Within These Walls
by White-Corner-Wall
Summary: When Artemis relocates schools to Gotham Academy she is determined to keep her head down. But something strange is afoot. The school hosts abandoned hallways and stairs that lead to nowhere. And something more sinister lurks within its walls. When students begin to disappear, it is up to Artemis and the charismatic freshman, Dick Grayson, to solve the mystery-before it's too late.
1. Chapter 1: An Old, Grey Building

Chapter 1: An Old, Grey Building

The building was old and grey. She hated it already.

It was the first day of the new term and the courtyard was milling with students, unfamiliar faces dressed in skirts and ties with shiny black shoes and shiny black laces.

She was in a bad mood. She had spent an hour trapped inside the sweaty metal skins of buses and trains to get to Gotham Academy on time. An hour spent pressed up against strangers dressed in their business suits, hiding their faces in their 'I'm too good to talk to you' newspapers. Sweat patches forming on their silk shirts as they glanced at their gold watches hoping to not be late.

She didn't like enclosed spaces. Maybe it was just the crowds of boring, mundane people that seemed to chafe at her.

She tugged at her skirt and scratched at her collar–the uniform sucked. Her new shoes pinched at her toes. She would never be able to fight properly dressed in this. Maybe that was the point. She couldn't believe she had allowed her mum to talk her into this. But the Wayne Foundation Scholarship was too shiny a coin to pass up. The letter had said something about 'academic excellence' and 'socio-economic disadvantages' but she knew that was bullshit. She had never been any good at school.

The sun was peeking over the shoulder of Gotham city, its watery light making the silver skyscraper shards shine. Gotham Academy was left in shadow. The school was in a nice neighbourhood–far from her apartment block (hence the hour long commute). The houses nearby were large, tucked behind cute, white picket fences. Their flowerbeds were carefully cultivated, lawns mowed, windows sparkling.

The only similarity between those houses and Gotham Academy were that they were both buildings, filled with rich people, and they had been built in the same area.

Okay, maybe she was being unfair. But there was something about Gotham Academy that had her feeling on edge. Maybe it was just the nerves. She fought against super villains, for heck's sake! No one else here could shoot an arrow straight out of a backflip and hit the target ten times out of ten. But there was something about starting somewhere new, where nobody knew or expected anything about or from her that filled her with equal parts anticipation and dread that coiled around inside her stomach like worms.

"Hi, you must be Artemis! I'm Bette. I'm here to show you around." Okay so maybe she wasn't as invisible as she had thought. The voice had bubbled out of a blonde girl who was now in front of her. She was buxom and her clothes were neatly ironed. Her makeup was immaculate. She made the uniform look good on her. Artemis tugged her skirt lower.

"I'm Artemis, although… uh… you already seem to know that," she said. The girl giggled, and Artemis felt her cheeks redden. She shifted the bag on her back. It was heavy. She didn't have her timetable yet, so she had brought all of her textbooks. They weighed her down like bricks.

Suddenly someone was pressed against her side, something held out in front of her. Her muscles clenched and she forced herself to not dislocate the warm arm that snaked around her shoulder.

"Relax," the boy said. "We'll laugh about this someday." The phone in front of her clicked, the boy smiled at her and ran off. There was almost something familiar about his voice and dark hair, but she couldn't place it.

"Who was that?" she asked Bette, turning to see the boy as he walked off after a willowy redheaded girl.

Bette looked over past her shoulder. "Just some freshman. You'll find that we're all very welcoming here at Gotham Academy," she smiled at Artemis, and turned towards the large uninviting entrance of the school. "I'll show you to the office so you can get your timetable."

* * *

They walked through the hallway. Bette made introductions to the students who walked past or who leant up against their lockers like question marks.

"This is Artemis, she's new here. She came here from… Where did you go again, Artemis?"

"Gotham North."

"Oh do you know Susan?" a small mousy-haired girl asked. "Susan Foles?"

Oh, the bitch, Susan, the one who Artemis had punched in the face the first day of freshman year. "Don't think so," she said.

"Oh."

By the third person Artemis had zoned out, and now just smiled blankly at the next person as they were presented to her. She just wasn't that interested in having friends at Gotham Academy. She didn't have time. And anyway, she already had the Team. They were the only friends she needed. If they're still your friends after they find out you're lying to them about your family, she thought.

No, they'd understand. She'd worry about it if she told them.

When she told them.

They reached the office without any incidences, although she already felt lost within the twisting hallways and numerous stairways. It was as if the floors didn't quite line up. On the way they had climbed up two flights of stairs and yet were still (Bette informed her) on the same floor. When she had questioned Bette about it, Bette had shrugged and said "It's an old building. Of course it has its quirks."

Artemis thought it was a bit illogical to put the reception somewhere in the middle of the building, but hey, she wasn't an architect or interior designer. Two workers were stencilling what was presumably meant to 'office' on the frosted glass door, but they had missed an 'F' so were now angrily scraping away their work.

Inside, the office smelled like printer ink and fresh paint. A receptionist tapped away at a computer, dark hair cut short, face downturned. The desk she was sitting at was cheap, and the lacquer was peeling.

"This is Artemis…"

"Crock," Artemis supplied. Bette flourished her arms at Artemis as if she were unveiling a new statue of Superman or presenting some official trophy.

The woman didn't look up from where she was typing. After a moment of silence interrupted only by the click-clack of the keyboard, and the scraping of the file with a loud cuss from the workmen outside, the receptionist placed a sheet of paper up onto the desk without looking up.

When Artemis didn't move, the receptionist looked up. She wore red rectangular glasses. "Timetable," she said, then looked back down and continued typing.

Artemis walked over and took the piece of paper. She looked at her timetable. English, Gym, double Math–not bad... Wait what? She hadn't signed up for Drama.

"Excuse me I think there's been a mistake? I–" Artemis began.

"–No mistake," the receptionist interrupted.

"But-"

Anything she was about to say was drowned out by a renewed flurry of typing. She huffed, and was about to let loose on that woman spawned in hell when Bette grabbed her arm and gently but firmly dragged her out the door.

"Come on, Artemis, we'll be late," Bette said. "And that's pretty much the last person in the school you want to annoy. She inputs all your grades, has the final say for all you classes…"

They exited the office and turned down the opposite direction they had come from, Bette eventually letting go of her arm.

* * *

"Don't believe what they say," Bette said.

She had insisted on walking Artemis to her first class after she had shown Artemis her locker (which was small, and smelled strangely of oranges).

"About what?" Artemis said.

Compared to before, Bette walked quickly. Artemis had to half-run every third step so as to not be left behind.

"About the school." Bette turned to Artemis and leaned in close. Her hair smelled like strawberries and her breath was hot and minty. "It's not actually haunted."

"Oh." Artemis was taken aback. "I'll ah, remember that."

"Amalia was unhappy. She didn't just disappear like the rumours say. She just…" Bette trailed off and slowed down as they climbed a flight of stairs. A girl had dropped her books and was blocking the stairwell. Bette pushed past her. Artemis did the same, muttering an apology to the girl. "Left." Bette finished, "She just left."

Bette came to a stop, and Artemis stumbled into her. She put her hand out instinctively to catch her fall and it hit Bette's shoulder, her fingers trailing like pale tree roots over her neck. Bette's neck was cold and clammy. Like she had just been underwater.

Bette flinched. Artemis pulled her hand back. There was an awkward silence.

Bette looked up at her, eyes deep and dark like seashells. For a moment there was an overwhelming sadness on Bette's face like a flitting shadow.

But then Bette flicked her hair off her face in a golden wave, and just as quickly, whatever it was it was gone, and Bette was the same person Artemis had met in the courtyard before–happy and bubbly and all smiles.

Except for the small tick above her right eyebrow. It jumped every few seconds, like it was being pulled up by an invisible puppeteer.

"Here you go," Bette said. She gestured to the classroom they had stopped in front of. "This is your class. I'll see you in Gym later."

Bette walked away and was lost in the bustle of the hallway before Artemis could say either thank you or goodbye.

She checked her phone. She was still a few minutes early. As she waited more and more students arrived and milled around the classroom doorway talking about their vacations and their families and their hook-ups and their sick pets. It seemed like here, everyone knew everyone. And it also seemed, as Artemis listened to a boy describe flying halfway across the world over the last weekend to catch the snow season as simply as if he were reciting a shopping list, that everyone here was rich.

Artemis didn't have anything against rich people per se, it was their attitude she hated. There were millions and millions of starving people around the world who had nothing, and this boy flippantly took his family's private jet to go skiing? She didn't blame him exactly, it was society's construct. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and the broke starved. At least Green Arrow used his money for good; charities, and foundations and the like (not to mention financing vigilantism), but there was always something more the rich could do. Should do. It was as if they didn't care. They were like a looter who steals from a store while around them the store is burning down.

Bruce Wayne spent his money on you, so you could come _here_ , she reminded herself. She looked around at the strange faces surrounding her. Thank you _so_ much, Bruce Wayne.

"Hey, New Girl." He made it sound like a name rather than an unfortunate occurrence.

His voice was a gravelly bass, and it belonged to a squat boy with a square jaw. He wore his tie crookedly in a way that suggested it had taken him a few minutes to arrange it. His hair was cropped and his eyes were a startling shade of blue.

"I'm Billy. This is Tack." He gestured to the lanky boy standing next to him. It looked like a giraffe was standing next to a rhinoceros.

Tack waved awkwardly at her, teeth flashing white and crooked. His smile was infectious and Artemis could feel her lips quirking in reply. She fought the smile down. So maybe they weren't all bad at the school. But she still wasn't there to make friends. She just wanted to graduate and leave.

"It's actually Artemis. New Girl is a name that's more common… hmm let me think… nowhere."

Her reply didn't discourage them like she had thought it would. Billy and Tack laughed. When he laughed Billy's eyebrows waggled up and down like thick caterpillars.

"Touché, Artemis," Billy said. He had leant up against the doorway, one foot tucked under the other as if he didn't have a care in the world. His eyes shone like ice.

"Artemis," Tack said. "Like the archer?"

She smiled then despite herself, "you have no idea."

"You're right. Is that Greek or Roman mythology? I can never remember," he muttered to himself.

Billy had produced a packet of chips from some pocket on the inside of his blazer and was munching on them contentedly. His square jaw worked methodically, like a wood-chipper. He must have noticed her watching because he offered the packet to her, eyebrows raised. She shook her head. He shrugged and continued crunching away.

"So, why'd you move here in the middle of the semester?" Billy asked in between mouthfuls.

Artemis shrugged, "guess that I felt like I wanted a breath of fresh air."

"Ah," Tack nodded sagely, "parents forced you to come here, eh? Join the club."

"I..." She was stumped–she wasn't normally read that easily. The bell rang high and piercingly loud. That would get annoying, but for now it was a welcome distraction from that line of questioning. The teacher swept past them and into the room, students following afterwards like leaves blown in the wind.

Billy waggled his eyebrows at her as he and Tack went in. She lethargically followed them.

It turned out that the seats were assigned. The boy sitting in front of her was so tall she couldn't see past his head to the whiteboard.

Even worse, she spent the whole of English being hit on by the guy sitting next to her.

"Hey cutie, can I borrow a pen?"

She rolled her eyes and didn't answer. She couldn't decide what the worst part about it was–that this was the fourth time he had asked her this question or that it was now forty-five minutes into the lesson. If you can't acquire a writing utensil or a new pickup line in forty-five minutes then you are a complete and absolute idiot, Artemis concluded.

It was hot in the classroom, and not from any emerging sexual tension. The air-conditioning was broken. It was hot and stuffy. The room was small and packed. The students were hunched over their desks.

The teacher droned on about Shakespeare. His arms occasionally gesticulated wildly like he was brushing away a fly or was having a heart attack. His name was Brown or Beige or something. Some boring colour.

The underarms of the teacher's white shirt were soaked with sweat, and he mopped at his brow with a soggy tissue. A small piece of the tissue got stuck between the wrinkles on his forehead and it bobbed up and down like a buoy as he frowned in various stages of frustration about the classroom.

Her desk was covered in graffiti. She traced the grooves idly with the tip of her finger. It was strange to think that all the different marks were different people. She wondered what she would leave behind when she left, you know, when she died. Her 'part-time job' wasn't exactly the steady hallmark of America's workplace safety standards. It was kind of inevitable really. Who was the last superhero who had retired to a small beach-side home to live with their seven cats, making tea and baking biscuits until a heart attacked swooped in one night like a hawk to drag them off to heaven or wherever?

How many people would remember her, when she was gone? She might not even make it to superhero status. Artemis couldn't count the number of young sidekicks that had died trying to step into their mentors' shoes, and that was half because she had forgotten all of their names.

And thinking about leaving got her thinking about Amalia, whoever that was. 'She just left,' Bette had said. What did that mean?

Artemis sighed and stopped tracing the marks and scratches. There was no use thinking about it. It was so hot her arms seemed to stick to the cheap wooden desk from her sweat. Her heart seemed to thud deeply in her chest. She brushed her fingers over the soft hairs on her knuckles.

The boy threw a ball of paper at her, presumably because he didn't have the mental capacity to fold it into an airplane. It hit her on the side of the face and landed on her desk. Billy and Tack who had somehow managed to land seats next to each other at the back by the open window, burst out laughing. She turned in her chair and glared at them. She half-welcomed the distraction.

Billy and Tack weren't the only ones who had noticed.

"Please don't pass notes in my classroom. If you have something to say, everybody can hear it," Brown-Beige said. "Pass it here." He directed the last part to Artemis.

As much as she didn't like Romeo next to her, she wasn't exactly a fan of people of authority humiliating the people they were meant to be teaching. Batman or Black Canary would never do anything like that to the team.

"But you told us to not pass notes in your classroom, and now you want me to pass one up to you? That's a bit confusing, Mr… sir." She looked up at him, a look of feigned confusion on her face. She still couldn't remember his name. There were a few laughs and mutterings from the classroom. She was pretty sure it was Tack who snorted.

The white blob of tissue sunk lower. "I don't appreciate the snark, Miss Crock, and your first day too," he said.

"Comes with the package." She smiled sweetly up at him.

He grumbled a bit, but the lesson went on without any more note sharing. The ball of paper sat safely in front of her on her desk. Artemis leaned back in her chair and tried not to think too deeply about life, or fall asleep. It was a hard task.

Eventually the bell rang.

She was up out of her seat immediately, moving towards the gymnasium. Finally something she was good at. Or at least something that wouldn't verge on thinking-about-suicide-to-escape boring.

As she left the classroom she opened and read the crumpled note that she had saved being read out in class. 'Hey cutie, can I borrow a pen?' it read. She almost laughed. Almost. Just from the irony of it all. She scrunched it up and threw it in the next bin she came across.

She passed the same boy in the hallway. "Maybe next time you should ask to borrow a better line," she threw him something that he fumbled and dropped onto the floor. He leaned over and picked it up, hair flopping over his eyes.

She left him looking confused, holding her pen. She'd had worse starts to first days.


	2. Chapter 2: The Shape in the Window

Chapter 2: The Shape in the Window

"Hey, Artemis, wait up!" She slowed down in the hallway, turned to see Billy and Tack hurrying after her, bags slung nonchalantly over their shoulders. Tack had been the one to call out.

"Where are you going?" Billy asked when he reached her. He'd taken off his tie since she had last seen him, and his shirt was untucked.

"Seeing as we have gym class, I thought I'd make an appearance at… you know, the gym," she said.

"And which way's that?" Billy said. Next to him Tack snickered. She glared at him.

"Uh…" She checked the grainy map printed on the back of her timetable. The buildings looked like blotches of spilled ink. "This way." She pointed the way she had been walking a lot more confidently than she felt.

"Well, Marco Polo, if you keep going that way you might just reach China eventually," Billy said. At that Tack finally burst out laughing. He laughed with his whole body, torso quivering like a conifer in the wind, eyes screwed up to become slits. He would have laugh lines by the time he reached twenty, she thought.

"What's so funny about the new girl not knowing her way around?" she said.

This end of the hallway was practically empty except for a few students scrabbling around in their lockers. She winced as one boy caused a book and paper avalanche, books slapping the ground with a loud echo. Papers whirled off, skidding through the air, to float gently to the ground. The boy ran after them, snatching them up.

"Not the new girl. Artemis." Tack grinned moronically.

"Is there a difference?" She frowned at them.

"You seemed to think so about an hour ago," Billy said.

She _had_ asked to not be the 'New Girl'. She couldn't really complain about being teased and treated like normal for once, could she? The boy had finally picked up all of his papers, and hurried off down the corridor.

"I… gah. You're both so–"

"–Sophisticated, intelligent, and probably the greatest things on Earth apart from nachos and chocolate?" Tack said. "We know."

"I was going to go with incorrigible."

"You can encourage me." Tack winked at her.

She stared at him for a second, looked at Billy who was shaking his head wincing.

"Well, shall we?" Tack said. He walked off in what was apparently the right direction, trailing his hand over the locks on lockers causing them to swing back and forth.

"So why did you move here?" Billy asked her, as they walked behind Tack, not hurrying to catch up. "And for a 'breath of fresh air' is complete bullshit and doesn't count as an answer."

"My Mum made me come here. Kind of… it's complicated."

"Not your Dad?" Billy asked, face tilted at her.

She looked down. Her hair covered her view. "He's… not really in the picture," she said.

Billy laughed bitterly. The sound seemed to sink into the floor and the dull, metallic lockers to either side. "Yeah, I get that."

They grew quiet. Artemis focused on each foot hitting the floor. She shifted her backpack higher. Why had she told him so much? She hadn't even told Black Canary anything at all about her family, and she was kind of her therapist.

"We're taking the shortcut!" Tack yelled from in front, breaking her introspection. He jogged over to them and ruffled Billy's head.

"Tack's parents shuffled him off here too," Billy said as they walked down a flight of stairs and out through a set of double doors into the cold sunlight of Gotham mid-morning. They were in a quad. Buildings rose up behind scratchy finger-bone trees and dead flowerbeds.

"Yeah," Tack said. "Rich parents who don't want little Johnny underfoot while they're trying to run the family business. That's pretty much the only requirement for Gotham Academy." He shouted the last part, blonde hair eddying in the wind, face upturned to the sky, nose red from the cold.

The family business. She knew all about that, even if hers had been… less conventional, and a whole lot more illegal. Probably. She wondered how many mobsters' children were roaming the Gotham Academy grounds.

"We live in the dorms," Tack said, nodding his head to the large block building to their left built from vomit coloured sandstone. "They closed the girls' dorm and moved them in with us. Well, into the other wing of course. But hey," Tack grinned roguishly at Billy and winked at Artemis, "I'm not complaining."

Tack and Billy slowed down, looking to their right. Artemis tracked their gazes to the building on the other side of the grassy quad–opposite the male dormitory. The windows were shuttered and covered with dust and cobwebs. Were those burn marks that tracked up the walls like spray paint?

"Because of the fire," Billy added. Well that answered her question.

Tack nodded. "There was a fire in the girl's dorms. Last term. They don't know how it started. Anyway they moved all the girls out until they can repair it," he said. He looked serious, for once. His hands were deep in his pockets as if he were looking for something there.

She was reminded of what Bette had told her earlier.

"Hey, so uh, I've heard that this place is haunted?" Artemis laughed, feigning nonchalance but she really was curious.

She had seen many strange things in her time with the Team, and Zatanna alone had proven to her that the supernatural and occult were nothing to laugh at. And there was something strange about Gotham Academy, even if she couldn't quite put her finger on it.

"Those are the rumours," Tack said.

"The only thing haunting this school is Tack," Billy said.

Wait. What was that? She thought she had seen something. There! Up, right under the roof of the burnt dormitory. One of the window shutters wasn't quite sitting right, and half the window was unobscured. In it, there was a flash of pale pink the colour of salmon. Some fabric? A face? What was it?

Before she could quite make it out, Tack moved in front of her, tussling with Billy. She couldn't quite see over his head. She moved quickly around him, eyes roving across the face of the building looking for something, anything unusual. But whatever it was she couldn't find it.

In front her, the grass was stretched and sharp. It looked like oxidised copper wire.

A rabbit leapt out from a garden bed in a flash of white. She jumped, startled. It streaked across the quad to come to a rest about ten feet from her. Billy and Tack had started with her, but when they saw the rabbit they both laughed.

"It's just a rabbit," Billy said.

"Yeah," she said quietly, almost to herself. "Just a rabbit."

She couldn't help but look at it. And as she stared–watching it quiver, muscles jumping, whiskers twitching, almost glowing in the morning light–she couldn't help but remember.

* * *

"Ooh a pet bunny," Artemis said, eyes shining as she gazed down at the rabbit in the cardboard box.

"Well it's certainly a rabbit," Jade said. Her arms were folded and she leaned against the brick wall with a cat's lazy gracefulness. Artemis looked up at her, she was more tanned than Artemis and her hair was long and black. One day, Artemis wanted to be just like her.

It was a warm day and they had been lounging outside, taking a rare break when her father had gone inside and retrieved the cardboard box, giving it to Artemis. "The subject of your lesson this week, Artemis," he had said.

"Thanks Papa!" she laughed, running over to the large man and hugging him. There was a pause, and then he returned the hug, arms wrapping around her as large as pythons.

"What am I meant to do with it? Her," she corrected as she inspected the rabbit. She wasn't quite sure what its sex was, but it looked like a girl to her.

"Look after it, for now," he said.

"I'm going to name her Daisy." Artemis said.

Jade snorted. The sun sat high and proud like a shiny penny.

She spent the next week handfeeding Daisy weeds she picked from the apartment's community garden. Well she had started with picking Daisy vegetables, small stunted carrots and broccoli that twisted up and upon itself like green driftwood. But that first day Artemis had stood up, arms full with her spoils, her hands and shirt wet with dirt to find Mrs Cole standing over her, watching like a scarecrow. Her arms were bony and sagging in that old-person way, and slightly purple as if always bruised.

After a lecture about sharing and greed, Artemis had handed over most of the bundle, secreting a carrot or two into her pockets like how Jade had taught her to do with nickels over the dinner table. And so Daisy had been forced to live on dandelions and clover and those weeds that stretched so high and tall but didn't go far enough down and could be tugged out easily.

Daisy slept in the bottom of a shoebox. Artemis liked the way her nose twitched, how she seemed to pulse with her own heartbeat as if dancing to her own existence. She would take her out and hold her up on her windowsill, and together watch the city as it seemed to move around them.

Daisy grew on Jade too, and by the end of the week Jade was scratching between her ears, and talking to it a little. She still refused to call it Daisy, "You're quite cute, rabbit," she would tell it watching it eat a piece of grass, mouth moving like a wood chipper.

"So what did you learn?" Artemis's father asked her at the end of the week over the dinner table.

Artemis listed things out on her fingers. "She pauses when startled, she doesn't like being pet while she's eating. She likes dandelions but prefers the long tall weeds that come out easily and–"

"What would you say if I told you we had to eat her tonight to survive?" Her father cut in.

"What?"

"We're starving, we need to kill the rabbit and eat it. Would you do it?" He was staring at her now and it made her uncomfortable. She squirmed in the chair. She reached one hand up to rest on its wooden back, is if it gave her comfort.

"No of course not, she's my friend."

"What does the rabbit give you? Does it feed itself? Can it help you if you're ill? It's dependent on you. It has no value to you. Caring can be useful. But don't care for the useless." She looked away from him and at Jade. Jade was staring down at the table glowing honey from the light bulb that was hanging above it.

He must have brought the rabbit out with him, because he pulled the cardboard box out from under his chair and put it on the table. He opened it and pulled the rabbit out by its neck. "Come here," he said. "I said come here, Artemis." He gripped the rabbit by its neck. He grabbed Artemis's hand and put it on top of his around the Daisy's neck. His hand was rough and calloused compared to Daisy's soft fur. She tried to pull away but his hand was clamped on top of hers.

"Break its neck," he said.

"No." She started crying. Mucus blocked her nostrils so she breathed through her mouth, chest shuddering with sobs. She could feel Daisy quivering under her hand. She was scared.

"Break its neck," he repeated.

"Papa, why are you making me do this?" She stared up at him, fuzzy from tears. His jaw was clenched, his whole body stiff and cold as a cliff face.

He didn't reply. He put his other hand up to hold the rabbit still from its squirming. The hand on top of hers jerked with a sickening dull crack. The squirming stopped. She was screaming or crying, she couldn't remember which.

"It's just a rabbit," he said. He stood up.

* * *

"Artemis? Artemis, Hello?"

"Archer girl?"

She fumbled back into the present. Tack and Billy were staring at her. The rabbit was gone.

"You okay?" Tack spoke again.

"Sorry," she said. "Just being… existential."

She tried to wipe away the memory like rain from a windshield. She hadn't thought about it in years. Black Canary was always telling her she bottled everything up too much. She went to try to shove her hands into her pockets but just ended up scrambling at the rough fabric. These skirts didn't have pockets.

"Well, unless we want to be late…" Billy pushed her and Tack forward and she allowed herself to be led away. They probably thought she was weird. One of the strange silent types. Let them, she thought, she didn't care.

No. She was fine. She was doing fine. All she had to do was survive two more years at this place and then she could just go and live with the team if she wanted. Or go off, and go anywhere. Her mum could cope without her. After all, Artemis herself had lived without her for all that time while she was in prison. She didn't have to think about her childhood anymore, about Jade or her father. The memories were too painful, too stacked with little pointed barbs. She wanted to lock them up in a safe or jettison them out of a submarine.

Their feet were nearly silent on the pathway. They had reached the archway that led out of the quad. Billy and Tack were off to the side, heads together, whispering.

She glanced back up at the building again, but she couldn't find the pink shape, whatever it was. The sun seemed to slide off the whole building. But she could see that all the windows were covered. The shutters were down. Just like how it was meant to be.


	3. Chapter 3: Ironic Nomenclature

Chapter 4: Ironic Nomenclature

The gymnasium floor looked like her teacher's head. His name was Jim, he had said, and he didn't want to be called anything else. She had laughed at that, but no one else seemed to appreciate the irony. Half the class had turned to look at her and her laughter trailed off. She was more awkward than the girls in the sitcoms. She sighed. School sucked.

Jim was bald, and his head was shiny with sweat. As she had noticed earlier, it was the same colour as the lacquered wooden floor. His head was so round it looked like a wooden bowling ball had been transfixed onto his neck. He had a thick '80s moustache that covered a thin upper lip. In fact, everything except for his head was thin. He gestured with arms like rods from a broken umbrella, and his legs stuck out from his shorts like charging cords.

How ironic that her gym teacher looked as if he had never exercised in his life.

After walking through the strange main building where the hallways didn't seem to quite line up (which was nicknamed the Roost, Billy had informed her) and seeing the half-burnt dormitories on her way there, the gym was surprisingly modern.

Bleachers lay in front of the shining floor. Crash mats were standing against the right wall stuck in place by straps that looked like large seatbelts. The whole back wall was meant for rock climbing, covered in little multi-coloured plastic blobs that were nothing like a cliff. Half of them were missing, little holes surrounded by pale wood like a shitty tan line. With a quick glance she surmised that the missing pieces would make climbing the rock wall much more difficult than it was originally intended to.

They were sitting on the bleachers listening to Jim describe the rules of the class in his nasally voice ("And most importantly this class is an elective–all of you have chosen to be here, so have fun guys!") when she realised she hadn't brought her gym clothes. And she hadn't just left them in her locker; she hadn't brought them to school.

"Fuck," she whispered under her breath.

"I know," Tack whispered. "Look at those short shorts, what a man."

She couldn't help but look. She cringed. "No. Just. No."

Tack snickered. The whole class rustled to their feet at Jim's direction, heading off to the change rooms. She sighed and made her way towards the teacher. Just before she reached him, he shouted at the departing students. "And no setting the bathrooms on fire this semester! The school _will_ press charges, and that wouldn't make rich Daddy happy at all would it!"

"Umm, hello?" she said.

He turned to her, his head was even larger this close and she watched a bead of sweat hang from the edge of his nose like it was suicidal, but hadn't quite made up its mind.

"You're new here, right?" He checked his folder which presumably had a list of the students on it. "Artemis?"

"That's me," she said. "Sorry, I actually don't have my gym clothes with me today. I didn't know my timetable until I got here."

"Hmm." He had a habit of stroking his moustache when he was thinking. "Today you can wear something from lost property." He pointed at a small tub in the corner near the bleachers. "Hopefully something will fit you in there."

She nodded, and started walking over to it.

"Miss Crock," he called out to her before she had reached it. She turned to him. The folder was under his arm and he suddenly looked more authoritative. Swap the shorts for pants and the t-shirt for a suit and he could have looked like a lawyer or some crooked businessman. "Don't let it happen again." He nodded his head as if to congratulate himself, and then walked off, whistling a tune she didn't recognise.

The tub was almost empty. She raked her hands through the clothes, trying not to think where they might have been before, and looked for something to wear.

* * *

Artemis walked through Gotham City. It had warmed up, and she turned her face up towards the sun, smiling. She enjoyed the outdoors, especially after being cramped up inside of Gotham Academy. She didn't know how she could last another week, let alone two years there. Even gym hadn't gone well. The only clothes she could find that fit her were an overly large t-shirt that billowed around her like a cloud, and short-shorts with love hearts printed on them. After studying herself in the cloudy change room mirror searching for the courage to join the class, she was sure of one thing–she looked ridiculous.

The lesson hadn't gone much better for her after that. They played volleyball, and while she was super competitive, she wasn't all that good. Not to mention the flat shoes she had scrounged gave her no purchase on the gym floor, and so she had spent the better part of an hour sliding around like a penguin, her hair sticking to her sweaty face. After the bell rung, she had changed as fast as she could, waved a quick goodbye to Tack and Billy who had looked at her questionably as she ran past them, grabbed her bag, and left the school. She didn't have any more classes that day.

She was free!

Gotham City bustled around her. Taxis honked, and the trains in the subway rumbled below, their noise rising up like smoke through the metal grates that emitted a metallic smelling hot wind. Flower vendors on the street bundled up tulips and roses and other flowers that Artemis didn't know the name of. Empty buckets, water and trampled flowers and broken stems littered the street.

Old friends ran into each other, laughing and hugging. She watched as a man was pickpocketed by a small dusty-faced boy. The man was talking loudly into his mobile, other hand resting on his forehead in the universal symbol of frustration. The boy reached his hand so surreptitiously into the man's pocket that she almost missed it. Pedestrians flowed past, unaware. Two policeman walked past, radios crackling, their shiny boots stomping on the chewing gum spotted street. The boy froze, he had seen her looking. Before he bolted, she raised her finger to her lips. She could keep a secret.

She had a soft spot for poor, hungry kids. And besides, she was off duty.

She bought a pretzel from a vendor, burning her fingers on the hot food. Gotham's skyscrapers reached up into the sky like grasping fingers, or glittering sharp teeth. Eating her food, bag slung over her shoulder, she made her way to the backstreet that would take her to the cave.

Sometimes, it was nice to just be able to relax.


	4. Chapter 4: Holiday

Chapter 5: Holiday

"Enter Artemis, B-Zero-Seven."

You would have thought that teleportation would be a bit more dramatic. There was a flash of light, a slight tingling sensation (like dipping your toes into water) and she was there, no longer in the grimy telephone booth in the grimy Gotham alleyway, but Mount Justice. The Cave.

She felt like she was at home.

She hid it well, but she was always nervous using the Zeta-Beam (Zeta-Beaming?). It was the way every molecule in her body was picked up and transported to another place that unnerved her. What if every time it happened, some small part of her was lost along the way? And someday she woke up and she wasn't herself, or she had an extra arm or something.

She knew that the tech had been created and advanced by some of the smartest minds in literally the universe, as far as anyone knew. But accidents can always happen right? That's what her… father had used to tell her. "You're stupid if you go into a fight without a plan, Artemis. But remember, accidents happen. Sometimes, the fights come to you."

She used to think that he loved her. When he ruffled her hair, which she pretended to hate, grinning his large dopey smile with his too-white teeth, she believed it. And sometimes he would lift her up towards the sky. She was tiny in his arms. He would spin her around as she stared upwards like looking into a kaleidoscope and marvel at how small they all were and how big–how wide, the sky was. Sometimes, he pretended to drop her. She would squeal and close her eyes, feel her body dropping and imagined she was flying. And all at once his arms would be right back around her, sturdy as oak trees.

"I've got you," he would say, "I've got you."

She realised she was standing alone in the hangar. She shook her head, imagining those memories spilling out of her like a waterfall. She felt her eyes prickle. From the dust, she told herself.

She walked to the lounge room, thinking that if the team was in the Cave, they'd be there. But once she arrived, the room was silent and still. Someone hadn't cleaned up the kitchen. Dirty dishes were stacked haphazardly in the sink. The bench was covered in flour.

"Artemis, please come to the mission room," Black Canary's voice echoed out through the speakers on the wall. Every room had them, the Cave was deceptively large, and without Megan's telepathy or a constant comms link, it would have been hard to communicate without some sort of PA system.

* * *

She stood at the doorway to the mission room. She tugged her skirt down. There was something about the Academy uniform that just made her feel more vulnerable, childish. And she already felt like her place with the Team was at risk. They were still looking for the mole, and while it wasn't her, there was something about the way Kaldur and the others stared at her that made her feel like they were judging her. Like she was the enemy. Like she was lying to them. You are lying to them, she thought. Green Arrow's _niece_? How long will that hold up?

Before she could think anymore she stepped inside. Black Canary was sitting at the desk, in front of which was a wall covered in monitors. News stations and information scrawled through the holographic screens. She thought she saw the word 'Sportsmaster' somewhere, but before she could pin it down it had swam off in a scrawl of black typeset and images of some desert.

Kaldur and Wally were standing behind Canary. Wally was slouched, hands uncharacteristically empty of food. Kaldur stood tall, muscular arms folded behind him. The three of them were in conversation when she entered, but she couldn't hear anything specific. Well, the two of them. Kaldur and Canary seemed to be arguing about something, Wally just stood there, face glum, occasionally seeming to inject some quip or a shake of his head.

She cleared her throat before they thought she was eavesdropping.

"Artemis, it's good to see you," Black Canary said.

"Hey, Artemis." Wally garbled out, staring down at the floor. He turned to Kaldur and Canary. "I've just remembered I've got some showering to do."

"Showering?" Artemis asked.

"Showering? Did I say showering? I meant welding. Uh yes." Wally sped out the door with a crackle of lightning. Papers on the desk flew into the air then slowly sunk to the floor like parachutes. Canary sighed.

Something bad was coming. Wally had a way of knowing exactly when to leave before things got ugly. Usually he just chose to stay anyway, but sometimes he cut and run. His was like a dog barking before the earthquake hits.

Artemis made eye contact with Kaldur. She once again found herself surprised by their shade of grey. Like the sky above the sea before a storm.

He looked away first.

"Artemis…" Black Canary began.

"No," Kaldur cut her off. "I'm the team leader. I should be the one to tell her."

Black Canary nodded, looked at Artemis, and walked out of the room, heels clicking on the floor.

Tell her? Tell her what? Her mouth was dry as sandpaper. She could taste the stale salt and oil from the pretzel she had eaten earlier.

Kaldur put his hand on her shoulder. "Artemis, we're giving you a break from our main missions."

The earthquake hit.

He kept talking but she couldn't make out the words. A break? From missions? Her stomach dropped like a stone. She felt sick.

"Why?" she choked out.

"Well you and Robin –"

"Robin! What does Robin have to do with this?"

He looked at her and she looked away, stared at the steel floor. She wanted to scream and cry and shoot something.

"As I said earlier, you and Robin are both taking breaks from main missions to focus on something a bit closer to home. Focus on your schoolwork, Artemis." He glanced down at her uniform, she blushed despite herself. It made her angrier.

"Settling in," he continued. "You and Robin are both… similar in that regard. You'll receive your new orders within a week." He spoke in his soft, slow way like he was addressing a room full of scholars. "You're not off the team Artemis, in case you were worried. You're a respected part of it. And I know the whole team, and most of the league feels the same way."

"Not off the team huh." She scoffed.

Her mind was churning. If the same thing was happening with Robin then it meant they hadn't found out about her lie. And besides, if it came from the top, then it could have nothing to do with that, Arrow and Batman and a few others probably, knew already.

He was finished with his rehearsed speech, she could tell. His posture had relaxed. He stretched his arms out behind him. The black tattoos stood out, languid like snakes, or seaweed.

"Think of it like a holiday,"

"A fucking holiday," she mumbled.

"What was that?" he asked.

"Nothing."

She sighed and slumped down over a desk chair, facing backwards, arms and legs spread out squid-like. She was wearing a skirt. She didn't give a fuck.

"Artemis." He had knelt down beside her. "This wasn't my decision. It came from the top. A holiday. A month or two tops. Then come back to us. Okay?"

She turned and looked at him, at his steel-eyes.

"Okay?" he repeated.

"Okay," she said. "But I want it known that I'm not happy about it."

The tips of his lips turned upwards. "I don't think I'll have a hard time convincing everyone of that."

She laughed then despite herself, wiped at her eyes. It was dusty in here, too. Kaldur looked uncomfortable again.

"Holiday… means holiday, Artemis. You can't come back into the Cave until it's over. If it's an emergency, call it in."

She paused. A month, two months, without seeing her best friends? The people who understood her most in the world?

"At least you'll have Robin," Kaldur said.

She had left without saying goodbye to anyone. She knew it was childish, and Black Canary had looked at her with a mixture of sympathy and parental disagreement when Artemis stalked past without saying anything. But she knew it was the only way to leave without breaking down.

She was running on autopilot, everything was fuzzy, like looking through someone else's glasses. She checked the monitor that showed CCTV of the phone-booth alleyway which was her ticket to home, made sure nobody was in the alley or phone booth, and disappeared in a thousand motes of light.


	5. Chapter 5: Umbrella Etiquette

Chapter 6: Umbrella Etiquette

Artemis stepped out of the telephone booth.

It had grown colder. The sky was now grey. Artemis shivered. A newspaper pin-wheeled down the alley like tumbleweed.

It wasn't a nice alley. They had those in some cities–the clean, cobbled alleys lit by large jellyfish-globe lights. Not Gotham. Gotham was filled with twisting alleys that ran like intestines through the city's belly. Mangled and dirty and large and thin and damp. Mothers would hurry past holding their children's hand, hoping to get home before dark. This alley wasn't terrible, by Gotham's standards. But nowadays Gotham's standards were low.

The alley smelled like urine and dog shit. Refuse and garbage were stacked up to the sides against cracked brick walls that maybe used to be orange but were now black with grime.

She felt the dirty sky pressing down on her. A break from missions? How would she cope? She had finally found a place where she felt like she kind of belonged, or at least had the capacity to eventually. But now they were pushing her away.

But then why was Robin sidelined too? She –

"Artemis, funny running into you here."

She spun around at the voice, startled. It was the freshman from her school, the one who had taken the photo of the two of them. He had changed, and was wearing a blue sweater. He had one foot against the wall, and both hands in his pockets. He looked lazily graceful. It reminded her of her sister.

She had checked the monitors before she went through the zeta-beam, and it was pretty much instantaneous. How had he gotten there without her seeing? Had he seen her suddenly appear in the telephone booth?

"You know, it's pretty creepy that you keep running into me, knowing my name when I know literally nothing about you," she said.

"Literally nothing, that's untrue. You should know by now that I'm devilishly handsome." He smirked at her.

She snorted. "Dick," she muttered.

"See, you do know me," he said. He had sidled forward and was now standing in front of her. "Dick Grayson." He stuck out his hand. "Pleased to meet you."

She looked up at his blue-black eyes and half-smirk. She folded her arms. His smile didn't falter.

"What brings you here?" he gestured around at the alleyway.

She pointed at the telephone booth. "Oh, just making a phone call."

Her phone buzzed from her bag and she cursed silently to herself.

The boy, Dick, raised an eyebrow at her. "Needed a bit of anonymity?"

"Can't make bomb threats to Gotham Academy with my personal phone, can I?"

He laughed loudly, his eyes crinkling up like the corner of a crisp packet.

The phone buzzed again. She unslung her backpack, carefully scrounging for the phone.

"Why the fuck don't these skirts have pockets," she muttered

The backpack had all of her gear inside it. She'd taken spares from the Cave–if there was one thing she had learned from her time on the Team, is that it gives to be prepared. Although it would be a little embarrassing if she compromised her secret identity trying to find her phone. She imagined it now: suit and bow and arrows falling out onto the grimy pavement, Dick staring at her. "Umm, fancy dress?" She might say. Yes, that would be awkward.

She found the phone without any trouble. It was Oliver. She didn't want to talk to him. The order to suspend her from the team had come from 'higher up' Kaldur had said. Had it been him? He had always been a little over protective of her. She thought he viewed her like the daughter he never had.

When she met Oliver, it had been a bad night. She had been new to the whole vigilante thing. She'd started about two months earlier to rebel against her father. He wanted her to help the crime bosses, so like any other teenage girl her age would do, she shot them full of arrows instead.

Gotham's gangsters were a cut above the rest. And Mallory especially was a mean son of a bitch. He had been smuggling teenage girls from Thailand and China to be sold as sex workers. She had been trying to find out where the drop-off was for weeks. She found out from a small time dealer she threatened with an arrow to his throat, "See here," she said, pressing the tip to his throat. "See here." She promised him she'd let him go if he told her where Mallory was collecting them from. He told her, and she did.

The Southbank. It seemed like half the shady shit that went on in Gotham happened there. She found the shipping container, but Mallory wasn't there. The container was open. The girls were all dead. Blood. That was the first thing she saw. She never in her life had seen so much blood. The container reeked of its metallic, coppery smell. Something glinted in the corner of the container. She had waded through the blood, stepping over the bodies to see what it was. It was one of her arrows, she could tell by the fletching. Above it, illuminated by the weak circle of her flashlight, painted onto the rusty container wall was one word: Stop.

Mallory had time to have moved them, the girls. But instead he had killed them to send the message. To send her the message.

It was the dealer she had let go, she found out later. He had tipped Mallory off.

Vomiting, she had stumbled out of the container. She threw away her shoes because they had been coated in blood and she was worried about someone noticing. She could've just washed them in the river, but she had been in shock. She wasn't thinking clearly. So barefoot she had walked home, shaking uncontrollably. The city lights hung over her like oyster shells, her chest felt like an iron weight. Her feet were numbed from the cold.

She was halfway there when she had stepped on a piece of glass. She had barely felt it. It was just a dull ache in the sole of her foot. She looked up at the sky. It was a beautiful night. She can remember thinking how unfair it was that it was so beautiful, after something horrible had just happened. If there was a God, she had thought, he would send a sign, something to show that he had cared about those girls who had died inside of that rusty, steel box.

It had started raining. And then Oliver dropped out of the sky, although she hadn't known his name back then.

"You're the Green Arrow," she said. She had always been observant.

He had picked her up off the ground, although she never remembered falling. "I've got you," he had said. She thought he was her father for a moment, the nice, fake father from her childhood. For some reason she trusted him. She gave him directions to her house. "It's not your fault," he kept whispering to her over and over again until it was a mantra that echoed around her head. Not your fault. Not your fault.

The phone kept buzzing. She hung it up and put it on silent, then dropped it back into her bag. Dick was still there, she could feel his eyes on her.

It started to rain. She could feel the rain on her face like wet freckles. Her hair whipped around her from the wind.

"So, why are you here?" she asked.

"I heard what happened," he said at the same time.

There was a moment of silence. She could hear the cars sliding past from the road. She scuffed at the pavement with her right shoe. They had been polished and new just that morning. Now mud and refuse was caked onto the bottom. It reminded her of that other night long ago, when her shoes had been sticky with blood. Her stomach turned. She still had night terrors about it sometimes: the girls curled up like rusted snails, piled on top of each other, a neat hole in each of their heads.

"Claustrophobic," he said.

"What?"

"I'm here because I was feeling claustrophobic. My family… they're not exactly easy to be around. Sometimes I just need space. I go out, walk through the streets. I look at everyone else, all the people," he shrugged, "It makes me feel different, smaller, like my worries and anger are so useless compared to what else is out there. I wandered into this alley, and you were stepping out of the telephone booth."

"A big world," Artemis said softly.

"But I still ran into you," he said.

It started to rain heavier, rain drumming onto the ground. A dark sludge coalesced on the ground. Gotham wasn't the type of city rain could make more beautiful. Artemis looked up into the sky, blinking as a drop fell into one of her eyes.

Dick unfurled a small black umbrella. She didn't know where he pulled it out from. One of its support rods was broken, and an edge of the umbrella sagged and shook in the wind.

"Seriously? You wait until I get wet to bring out an umbrella?"

"You getting under or not?"

It was a long walk home. And the nearest bus station was a few blocks away as well. She weighed up the options, and decided that the umbrella was probably the most pleasant. She would tag along with the boy until it stopped raining, he creeped her out, or she reached the bus stop, whichever came soonest.

There wasn't enough room under the umbrella for the two of them. She pushed him across so the water trickled down his neck and not hers. He was surprisingly muscular. The jumper hid his form, but she felt it when she pushed up next to him, wiry, like a gymnast.

"Thank you," she said grudgingly.

They began walking. He held the umbrella slightly too low so that it was uncomfortable, but she didn't say anything, it was his umbrella.

"So, what happened that you heard of?" she said.

They passed the entrance to the alley, and walked out onto the street. A man in a dark coat scurried across the street, a newspaper over his head to protect him from the rain. He forced a taxi to stop, it slammed on its breaks and blared its horn at him, before peeling off and running a red light. The man hurried on, disappearing into the yawning mouth of a subway station, like a mouse that hurries off to its den, unaware of the commotion it has caused.

"You threw a pen at Brady McMarrow." Dick said.

A couple spun around on the other side of the street, umbrella held uncaringly at their side laughing in the rain.

"Who?" she asked, preoccupied with the couple's antics. Artemis liked watching people. There was something refreshingly innocent the way most people acted, especially when they couldn't see you watching.

The girl kicked a puddle at her partner. Her hair was braided and dark. The spray hit a man in a suit who she hadn't seen walking past. He frowned and shouted something at her. She nodded seriously back to him, but as soon as he was past, her and her partner dissolved into laughter. Artemis could hear them laughing from across the street.

"The guy who gave you the note in English. You know: shaggy hair, personality of a toothbrush," he said. "Good on you, don't let them get you down."

Oh right, he was talking about Mr unoriginal-pickup -line.

They overtook a man looking down at his phone, verging out onto the road to do so. Her foot caught on a metal grate, and she stumbled into Dick. He caught her arm without looking and she righted herself. He glanced sideways at her. She noticed an eyelash was stuck to his right cheek.

"I don't know why, but for some reason I didn't think gossip would spread so fast at a place like Gotham Academy… I just thought it would be different. It's stupid."

He snorted. "If there is one currency at Gotham Academy, it's gossip. It spreads like wildfire."

They were walking quickly. Dick seemed to glide, making no effort to move, but his gait seemed to eat up the pavement. She liked it. When she was young, seven or eight, and she was out with her mother, Artemis would always grow annoyed at how slow they walked. "Patience, Artemis," her mother would say, "The end can wait, let's enjoy getting there first." But Artemis would always rush ahead, tugging at her mother's arm, excited to get there, wherever it was: the supermarket, school, a friend's house, wherever. It was ironic that now whenever they went out, Artemis pushed her mother on her wheelchair. We only notice the things we have when we lose them, she thought.

And that got her thinking about the Team again. She sighed. They fell into silence, walking comfortably.

"I sit behind you in English," he said eventually.

She hadn't noticed him that morning. "Somebody told me you're a freshman."

"I'm an advanced freshman," he said. A staleman?"

"That was utterly terrible," Artemis said. But she found herself laughing as they walked off, huddled under the umbrella, the streets glistening with rain around them.


	6. Chapter 6: Waitresses and Belltowers

Chapter 7: Waitresses and Belltowers

"I'll have a cappuccino," Artemis told the redheaded waitress. She wasn't wearing a name tag. The girl smiled briefly at Artemis. After smiling once more at Dick, longer, bright teeth flashing, she waltzed off to serve another table. Her curves wobbled in all the right places.

What was it with him and redheads? Artemis thought, remembering the girl he had run off to after he had taken the photo that morning.

At Artemis' reluctance they had stopped at a coffee shop after the sky had opened even further, rain pouring down in sheets.

Through the shop window Artemis watched lightning lance through the grey sky, a white hot tree that grew and died in less than a second–delayed thunder like a military salute. It left behind nothing but its glowing afterimage which traced itself into her eyes. She blinked away spots.

The café was small and warm, almost stuffy. It was filled with bearded men and hippy-pants-wearing hippies. The wooden interior gleamed golden from the lighting.

Artemis folded her arms on the table, staring down. She was soaked through, and she hadn't brought her jumper with her. The school uniform shirt, with its amazing design, she had noticed, went see-through when wet. Dick had noticed too. Hence the folded arms.

She wiped a strand of hair off her face. She breathed in deeply, relishing the warmth of the café. It smelled of wood varnish and chocolate.

Dick's eyes followed the waitress as she bounced around the store.

"So," Artemis said. "You lived in Gotham long?" She took a packet of sugar from the container on the table, and fiddled with it, rolling it between her fingers like a cigarette.

Dick's eyes snapped to hers. "Small talk? We've fallen so far?"

"Just trying to make conversation," she said.

"No. I moved here for a change of scenery a few years back." He grew quiet at that. Artemis wondered what she had said wrong.

The sugar was now damp and crinkled from her ministrations. She dropped it before she accidentally ripped it open and sent sugar flying everywhere.

The lull in conversation was broken when the waitress came back carrying their two drinks. She leaned into Dick as she put his hot chocolate down. It reminded Artemis of a shark brushing up against its prey before going in for the kill. "I gave you an extra marshmallow," the waitress said.

Okay, not what Artemis had been expecting. Dick smiled back at the girl, and said thank you. She blushed furiously and hurried off.

Artemis snorted, and Dick looked over at her, mouth corners quirked upwards as if he were about to burst out laughing. But he didn't. He just looked at her, eyes unreadable, until she looked away first.

She stirred her coffee. Some had spilled over the edge, and was slowly making its way down the side to pool onto the table.

"Batman or Superman," Dick said while she was still stirring her coffee. "Who would you prefer?" He leant forwards, drink apparently forgotten. "Come on, everyone has a favourite."

"Superman," she said immediately. "I love me a man in tights."

She thought of both of them, man and Kryptonian. She didn't really like either of them. Sure, she respected them, was (she admitted to herself) slightly scared of them, but _like_? No. They… transcended that.

They seemed so stoic, emotionless. And Artemis knew that was exactly what was required to stay sane doing what they did, but it didn't inspire love or amiability. And the way Superman looked at Conner–not as a father looks at his son, but as a predator looks at a potential threat, something to be wary of, to be eradicated if needed–it made her shiver sometimes.

"You?" she asked in the silence.

"Batman, of course," he said.

Outside, a woman wrestled with her umbrella in the wind. It wriggled free, and she ran off after it, one arm held up above her face in a vain attempt to shield her from the rain, or maybe the wind, as the umbrella tumbled across the pavement.

"He's an ordinary person." Dick laughed, "well maybe not ordinary, but he's a person. He's human. Like you and me. He shows us that in a world full of aliens and people with amazing abilities, humans still have a place. We're not obsolete." His eyes sparkled for a moment, and then he looked down, finally took a sip of his drink. Marshmallows were stacked to the brim, bobbing like buoys.

Artemis shifted in her chair. She thought of the Team. Kaldur and Zatanna had their magic, Wally could run faster than the speed of sound. Megan could telepathically disable all of them while they slept if she wanted to. Conner was pretty much a slightly discounted Superman…What could she do? Shoot some arrows?

Don't be silly, she told herself, Green Arrow is a respected member of the League and that's all he does too.

But she couldn't shake the feeling that maybe that was why Robin and her had been kicked off the missions, that they were too normal, too weak. Maybe–

She cut off her train of thought. Dick was looking at her, an eyebrow raised like she was crazy. She glanced away, embarrassed.

"Just being–"

"Existential." he finished

She stared at him. His hair was even blacker wet, he had swept it off to one side sometimes during their conversation, but she hadn't noticed when.

"Exactly," she said.

Who was he? She felt as if they had met before, but they hadn't, except for that strange run-in the courtyard earlier that day, not to mention the other strange run-in in the zeta-beam alley.

Her phone buzzed. She grabbed it out of her bag. She swore when she got home she was going to sew a pocket onto the fucking skirt.

It was Oliver again. He had sent her a text this time: _A, we need to meet. Tonight, 9:30, the belltower._ _Be discreet._

She sighed. _Okay._ she replied. As she was putting her phone away she was hit by a thought.

"Hey have you heard of someone called Amalia?"

Dick shrugged. "She was in your grade. Sometime last term she just stopped coming to school. She left the country. Well, no one can find her here," he amended, "so everyone assumes she left the country. No one knows why."

"And what do you think?" she asked. Her coffee cup dangled from her hand. She absentmindedly took a sip. It was lukewarm. She made a face and set it down with a soft clatter.

He shrugged. "I have no idea." She didn't know why she was disappointed.

"Well, shall we?" He gestured outside. The rain had slowed to a drizzle. It was probably the best it was going to get.

"I think this is where we part ways," Artemis said. She fumbled for her wallet, and was opening it when he put his hand on her wrist. It was surprisingly warm.

"I've got this," he said. "A perk of being the ward of a billionaire: lots of coffee money."

She started to say something, she could pay for her own things, but he cut her off. "I insist," he said with a warm smile.

"Thank you," she said. She wasn't entirely sure she wanted to be in-debt to this boy.

"See you around," he said. Then loped off towards the counter the waitress was manning. He said some quip Artemis couldn't hear, and the girl bubbled over with laughter.

Artemis opened the door with a jangle, and was immediately hit by the cold breeze. Steeling herself, she stepped out onto the street. As soon as she had done so, it started to rain heavier. She sighed. Before she had finished crossing the street she was drenched again.

At least it wasn't that far to the bus stop.

* * *

She fumbled with the key in the lock. The lock clicked, but the door still refused to open. The door was stuck in the frame. It got like this every now and then. Her mother sometimes spent hours waiting for a neighbour to show up who could get it open. The landlord kept saying he'd fix it.

Artemis put her whole shoulder into it and the door finally swung open. She rubbed her shoulder. That would bruise.

She dropped her bag on the couch in the living room, turned on the lights. The dingy apartment lit up under bright fluorescence–she had bought the wrong light bulbs. The carpet was threadbare grey, the kitchen small and cramped. Actually that was pretty much how she would describe the whole apartment: cramped. She didn't know how they had ever fit a four person family into it. Then again, that hadn't lasted long.

Her mother wasn't home. Artemis didn't know where she was.

She stripped off her soaked clothes before she caught pneumonia or something, made her way to the shower. Her feet left wet imprints on the floor.

The water dribbled out of the showerhead like the coffee that had spilled over her coffee cup and trickled down its sides–tentative, as if scared of what it might reach at the bottom. She turned the heat up so it was scalding. Steam billowed up, barely being contained by the whirring fan set into the roof. Parts of her felt freezing, while others seemed to burn.

And people said showers were relaxing.

She sighed, and got out of the shower. She dried herself, wrapped her hair. She looked into the mirror. Her face was obscured by condensation. The metal door handle was wet with it too. Her mum was always telling her to have colder, shorter showers. "The wood will rot," she said. Artemis thought it might have something to do with the water bill as well.

Artemis paced the apartment. She went to try to sew a pocket into her skirt, but after pricking her thumb twice she remembered that she didn't know how to sew and gave up.

She burned some toast and ate it, smothering it in butter to hide its charcoal taste. She found herself in her room, looking at the Alice in Wonderland poster on the wall. She looked at for a while, then peeled it off carefully, folded it, and put it in her clothes drawer under her socks.

Finally it was time to leave. Her mother still wasn't home yet, but she shook her worry away, she knew her mother was stronger than she looked; she could look after herself better than most people who still had use of their legs.

Artemis dressed in her gear, gaining comfort just from the feel of the leather as she put it on, relishing all of its special, hidden pockets. She checked her bow string, oiling it, and making sure she had an extra string tucked away in a waterproof compartment on her belt. Bow strings were especially finicky in wet weather, and without the string her bow was just a fancy stick of wood. Mistakes and faulty gear was what got you killed. Oliver had drilled into her to always check her gear before any outing and to keep it well maintained.

Satisfied with her checks, she stretched, then opened her window and stepped out. The weather had cleared up. It was still cold, but more importantly it was less windy and wasn't raining. The smoothed stone ledge was slick with water, and she took care to not slip as she shut the windowsill behind her.

She made her way sideways to the corner of the building. She stretched up to grab the metal railing of the fire escape and pulled herself up onto the platform, then climbed the rusty ladder to the roof of the building.

Gotham never slept, not really. It stretched out beneath her like a Pollock painting. Strands of car lights blinking off pavement, dotted traffic lights, swathes of dark buildings punctured by yellow-square windows–how could something so _dirty_ be so beautiful?

The belltower was close by–one of the main reasons it was her and Green Arrow's preferred meeting place when he was in town. Here, the buildings squatted closely together. She easily leapt from one rooftop to the next, heading towards the belltower she could see poking up between two buildings like a blade of grass poking through a crack in the pavement.

Smoke and steam curled up from ventilators and chimneys and other mouths of buildings, billowing around her like flowing skirts of some invisible dancing woman.

Luckily, the street around the belltower was deserted. She shot a grappling arrow straight down, on the building she was on, and rappelled down to the street below. She would collect it on her way back.

She moved across to the belltower, but didn't run. Running would just catch the eye of any passer-by watching. It was dark enough that if she walked slowly, all they would see was a silhouette crossing the street, nothing suspicious. "Be discreet," Oliver had said. And if she fully intended to do just that.

The belltower door was unlocked. She slipped through and climbed the cramped twisting stairs. The stairs were uneven, the middle worn down from so many feet. Artemis didn't know when the belltower had been popular. It hadn't even been built next to a church. She didn't know why it hadn't been knocked down by now, although this neighbourhood didn't really count as prime real estate anyway.

Oliver was waiting for her when she reached the top. The bell hung above them, the bronze tarnished blue-green from age.

"Artemis," he spread his arms wide, smiling through his mask. She couldn't help but smile back, running over to him and hugging him.

"How long are you here for?" she asked once they had separated.

"Not long. I came to see you."

The sides of the top of the belltower were open to the wind, but metal grates foiled potential suicide jumpers and squatter pigeons. Wind flowed past them, whistling as it made its way through the maze of Gotham's buildings. Sometimes it sounded as if it was singing, but tonight the wind was a shrill sound that seemed to grate at the back of her hearing.

He laid a warm hand on her shoulder. "It wasn't my decision," he said. "But it's necessary." She opened her mouth to protest but he cut her off. "I can't tell you specifics, but there are… reasons behind it. Stay safe. Sometimes things are not what they appear to be."

She snorted. "Thanks, Confucius."

He looked at her and she looked away embarrassed. It wasn't his fault. She was being unfair and childish. Frustration bubbled up inside her throat. She wanted to scream. She banged her hand against the metal grating next to her. It clattered a disappointing dull metallic sound. A pigeon nesting in a cleft in the side of the belltower fluttered off, startled.

"And control that temper of yours, Artemis. It could get you–"

"–Killed, I know. It seems like pretty much everything can get me killed nowadays."

Oliver shrugged, "that's the job." He paused for a moment and then his tone changed, hesitant and serious. "You can always get out if you wanted to. This isn't for everyone. You could lead a normal life, go to school, get a job, make friends."

"I have friends," she said. She couldn't even think of a normal life right now. This was too much of a rush, everything else seemed so mundane. But she had gone out for coffee with Dick and that had been mundane and she had enjoyed herself, hadn't she? But every day like that–going to school, then University, all so she could get a good job to earn good money to buy a house and marry well and then retire and die… "No," she said. "This is something I need. And I'm good at it. I can help people."

Oliver smiled. "You are good at it. Oh well, I had to give it a shot or your mother would have killed me. She's a force of nature isn't she," he chuckled, shaking his head.

She had to agree with him there. His phone buzzed, he answered. She could hear a faint tinny voice on the end of the line. He listened for a moment then hung up.

"I have to go," he said.

"League business?"

"Something like that." He walked off to one side of the tower. He pulled at a corner of the mesh and it lifted up. He shot an arrow off the side, rope trailing behind it. It hit the building across, and the rope pulled taught.

"Take care of yourself," he called back to her.

She opened her mouth to reply, but he was already a green blur fading off into the darkness. She lifted the mesh back into place, leaving behind no trace that they were ever there.

She made her way down the steps, across the road and pooling streetlights, her only companions the moon and the cavernous dark.

* * *

 **A/N: Thank you all for reading this far, and for all your lovely reviews and comments. I normally would reply to this review personally, but decided that if other people were thinking the same thing, putting this here might benefit them.**

 **Panther4life said: "She has 1 actual class then gym. Who decided she needed a break? Oh wait, GA and Bats are overprotective, nevermind"**

 **If you re-read chapter one, you'll find that I set out that she only had two classes the first day. Now, I'm Australian and not all too familiar with the American schooling system, but in my final years of school, I myself and other people I knew had two 'free lines' that occurred next to each other which meant that I had days where I only had two classes, so I don't think that this is too unbelievable for Artemis.**

 **Anyway, if that is people's only complaint so far, then I am not fussed at all.**

 **Thanks again,**

 **WCW.**


	7. Chapter 7: Questions and Cocoa

Chapter 7: Questions and Cocoa

Her mother was waiting for her, sitting under the fluorescent lighting when she vaulted through her bedroom window and padded out into the kitchen for a drink of water. She could have been an art exhibition she was so still.

It was late. After her meeting with Oliver, Artemis had spent some time dangling her feet over high roofs, staring at the wide open space between her and the city, feeling sorry for herself. She tossed small pieces of gravel over the edge and watched as they grew lost in the darkness. She imagined them hitting the ground. Eventually she had gone home, sluggish in her weariness.

Artemis glanced at the clock on the microwave. 11:57, the clock was five minutes less a bit fast. She used to stare at it and at her mother's watch she had taken from her bedside table, imagining what the microwave had done in all that time it had lost.

There was a moment of silence. Artemis watched her mother's right eyebrow twitched, the way it did when she was stressed or angry. Or both.

"Where have you been?" her mother asked. She manoeuvred her wheelchair around so she was facing Artemis. She was frowning, her arms crossed in her lap.

"I could say the same to you," Artemis said, slumping down onto the couch and taking off her boots. It was cold in the house, wind trickled through under the door and the heater was temperamental at the best of times. She felt chilled to the bone, like her blood had turned to sleet.

"Don't talk back to me, Artemis." Artemis shrugged and focused on her other boot. "You didn't leave a note, you didn't text me, you didn't answer your phone…"

No surprises there, she turned her phone to complete silent when she went out in mask. She didn't want it to give up her presence when she would otherwise be unnoticed–unnoticed was safe.

"I thought you had stopped with…" She gestured up and down Artemis's body, stared at her mask as she took it off. "All this," she finished.

She frowned. "Who told you that?"

"The Green Arrow," her mum said. Of course he did. Artemis slung her quiver off her shoulder and onto the ground. Arrows clattered against each other, some sliding out onto the floor. "He said that you were taking a break from the Team, to focus on your schoolwork. I thought it was a great idea. But then today I get back and where are you? Gone! I was so worried about you, Artemis. I thought something had happened to you."

She opened her mouth to tell her that that wasn't what had happened. That she had been kicked of the Team for a while at least, for reasons she didn't know. But nothing came out.

Artemis looked across to her mother. With her sitting in her wheelchair, and Artemis on the couch their eyes were about level. She noticed her mum's hands, wiry and white knuckled gripping the sides of the wheelchair. She lifted a shaking hand up to Artemis's face, and brushed a strand of hair back behind her ear.

"I was so worried," she repeated, moving her hand to rest on her cheek. Her hand was still calloused and rough from her days as Huntress, but felt warm. It's funny, Artemis thought, how people move on with their lives but are still marked by what choices they've made. She glanced at her mother's wheelchair all shiny aluminium and plastic. Some more than most.

"I'm fine, Mum." Artemis pulled away, and slipped out of her gear. Underneath she was wearing a sports bra and hip shorts. She went to her room and put on her dressing gown, walked back out into the living room. Her mother was still sitting there, head bowed.

"I thought you were proud of me, of what I've become," Artemis said. "I'm helping people."

When her mum looked up at her she had tears in her eyes. Rivulets had tracked their way down to hide in her wrinkles, like little dams. "I am proud of you, Artemis. So, so proud. After what I did, and how your father taught you, Jade… No one was expecting you to take that fork in the road."

She pushed away the lump in her throat. She could feel the 'but' coming, everything was poised for it, her mother leaning towards her earnestly.

"But you're just a child, Artemis. And I know you didn't have the chance to be one before, that was my fault. But you could now. Don't you see what an opportunity you have? You don't have to live this life anymore." She rolled herself forward and reached out and gripped Artemis's arm. "You could be a normal teenage schoolgirl, Artemis. You and me… we could be a normal family again. I thought you taking a break from the Team meant that maybe you were ready for that."

Artemis looked at her mum, lips pursed, eyes bright and fervent as a preacher's. And it was tempting. She had spent half her life wishing to be normal. Hoping to do normal things with her normal family: going to the park with her mum and dad and Jade, licking melting ice cream as she and Jade ran under falling red and yellow leaves and silver high-rise spires, watching football inside the roaring stadium she saw sometimes on TV, and that was nestled like a silver egg near the horizon from her bedroom window.

But that daydream had crumbled to dust long ago. She thought of the rush of air on her face and bared midriff, the feeling of taking down someone who was otherwise going to hurt innocent people. Even if she could no longer participate in the Team's missions for the time, she could still patrol with Robin–he would probably be up for it. They could help keep the streets clean, keep people safe. It was what she was meant to do, for now at least.

"But we're not a normal family, Mum," she said. "We haven't been, since… ever." Her mother flinched like she had been physically hit, but Artemis saw the acceptance in her eyes, she already knew that. "But that's not the point," she said more gently. "I have this… ability to help people. And to not use that…" she pulled her arm away from her mother and knelt down and wrapped her arms around her in a hug. Her arms and shoulders were more muscular than they looked in her baggy clothing. "It would be selfish." Artemis pulled back from the hug and wiped away her mum's tears with the sleeve of her gown.

"But I will be taking a break from the Team for a little while," Artemis said. "Settling into Gotham Academy, being a little bit more normal. But I'll still go out on patrol occasionally. I'll leave notes," she added the last part quickly as her mother opened her mouth to say something.

It was silent except for the heavy breathy sound as the heater kicked in again. Her mother leant her head forward until their foreheads were touching. "I love you, Artemis."

"Love you too, Mum."

Her mum sighed, "I'm not going to be able to convince you out of this, am I?"

"Nope," Artemis said, even though she was pretty sure her mother already knew the answer.

"Okay," her mother said. And that was that.

She stood up and filled the kettle in the kitchen. She took out two mugs from the cupboard, and waited as the kettle started whistling.

"How was your first day?" Artemis's mouth quirked upwards at the olive branch. Her mum had always been good at moving forward, forgiving quickly–the opposite to Artemis.

"It was okay. Made some friends," she said, thinking of Billy and Tack and, surprisingly, Dick.

"Good." Her mother looked like she wanted to say something else, but she just shook her head and they shifted into a companionable silence.

The kettle finished. Artemis took the cocoa down in its box. She put two heaped spoonfuls into each cup, coughing when cocoa dust billowed up from the box like a dust cloud. She added an extra teaspoon of sugar to her mum's, just how she liked it, then poured the boiling water in, watching the cocoa bubble and mix in until it was a dark rich brown.

Her mother cupped hers patiently, warming her hands. Artemis sipped hers, burning her tongue and the roof of her mouth. They moved over to the window. Outside it had begun to rain.

* * *

She was lost. She had been on the way to the gym, following the little pixelated map printed on the back of her timetable. There had been the usual clamour that happens at schools after the bell–a wave of laughing faces and jostling elbows that poured out of classrooms and down hallways like water going down a drain. But then, so slowly that Artemis hadn't noticed, everyone in view was gone and all around her was quiet and empty.

She had climbed up to what she thought was the third floor. However it turned out she must have been on the first floor all along because she was now on the second. And, after walking for a while, turning this way and that, hoping for some clue to where she was, she was now lost.

She followed the linoleum floor out through a double set of doors and into the quad. The half-dead grass was wet and dewy; it had rained since the last time she had been outside. She hadn't heard it from within the main building. She felt her hair frizzing up from the damp and sighed–it would take hours to straighten it again. Ivy climbed the buildings unchecked. The buildings almost imperceptibly, all leaned to the left.

The only doorway into any of the buildings was directly across from her and was shut. Artemis checked the map but she couldn't find the quad on it. Everything on the map was clumped together and looked like little blobs. When she found her way out of this fucking maze she was going to have a word to someone in charge about the school's cartography skills.

She checked her phone. She was late, and owing the fact that she had no idea where she was, was likely to be much later.

The door wasn't locked. The doorway opened out into a much tighter corridor than the ones she had walked through previously. The air was musty. Thin, high windows were covered in dust and cobwebs. More than one window had been smashed, tape stuck over it as a makeshift repair. Weak light dripped from lights set in brass that were fixed to the walls. It looked much older than the other parts of the school she had seen.

"Hellooo, Miss Havisham," she called out jokingly. Her voice sounded dull, like it had been trapped in cobwebs or like water sinking into sand.

She passed several classrooms, but they were all empty apart from the desks and chairs that were stacked up in the corners.

There was nothing here, and it wasn't getting her any closer to the gym either. She turned to walk back out the way she had come. Something flashed across her vision. A fleeting shadow.

She frowned. "Hello?" she called out.

The lights flickered once then turned off. She felt her breath catch in her throat, and the hairs on the back of her neck rise. Probably just a power failure, she told herself.

The only light now came from the windows. It was weak, the colour of green tea before it had been steeped long enough. She pulled out her phone to use the torch, but it had died. Strange.

Her situation overwhelmingly reminded her of a horror film. She had always found them amusing and not in the least bit scary. Her, Megan and Zatanna occasionally hung out and watched them all night and into the early morning, scoffing popcorn and talking about boys, laughing at the way the dumb blondes wandered off alone into the woods to be hacked to pieces.

But there was something about the atmosphere, about the way the light clung to the dust, and filtered in through the windows like prison bars.

It unnerved her.

Had it grown colder or was that just her? She shivered in the light fabric of her blouse. She had to force herself to not wrap her arms around herself and keep them loosely at her side, ready for anything. She had settled into a half crouch, light on the balls of her feet. "Fighting ready" Black Canary would call it.

She reached for her bow but of course it wasn't there.

"If this is a prank I'll… I don't know. I'll do something!" Her voice sounded weak even to her, but a girl couldn't always be expected to look pretty, fight like a badass, _and_ have a witty quip at the ready. She could settle for two out of three. Right now, she'd settle for one.

The wind moaned. She hoped it was the wind. Her eyes had adjusted to the dark. She couldn't see anything unusual, everything was grey and smudged.

A small patch of shadow seemed to unfold itself from the wall and was slowly coming closer to her. She shut and opened her eyes but it was still there.

She blinked and it was in front of her. A swirling, inky black… shadow? She gasped. How had it been that fast? It wasn't in any shape or form. It looked like a large pool of _nothingness_.

And then it was in her face like oil, up her nostrils, everywhere, choking her. She tried to scream but nothing came out and she couldn't breathe. She tore at her face and hair with her hands but they couldn't feel anything apart from herself. She was going to die, she realised.

She woke up.

She shivered. She was soaked in sweat. It was just a dream. A nightmare. She sat up in bed and breathed deeply, counting slowly. One… two… three… four. She was okay, she was okay. Wind rustled through into her room, causing her to shiver more. She must have left the window open accidentally. Stupid. Moonlight dripped through a split in her curtains. What time was it?

All at once she was aware of something in front of her. A dark shadow up against her bedroom wall. It had just been a dream, hadn't it? She felt her breath catch in her throat with a throaty rattle. The shadow turned toward her at the sound. The moonlight picked out dark hair and tanned face.

"Jade?"

"You took down my poster," Jade said.

Artemis gaped at her. She didn't know what to say. And before she could say anything, Jade slinked off and disappeared out the window. The curtains flapped in the breeze. She looked across at the wall where Jade had been. The poster was back up on the wall, creased horizontally down the middle from Artemis folding it. Artemis stood up and shut the window, pausing to gaze out into the night. But there was nothing to see except for the darkness. She shut the curtains.

* * *

 **A/N: Thank you all who reviewed the last chapter, educating me on the American schooling system :) I'll eventually update chapters 3-6, I've already made some changes to the first few chapters to make the story more accessible to new readers as well as fixing the class scheduling error. Also for all of you who were wondering, Artemis and Dick are season 1 age.**

 **~WCW :)**


	8. Chapter 8: Too Many Doughnuts

Chapter 8: Too Many Doughnuts

She woke in the morning in the dark. She had kicked half her sheets off in the night and her torso was bared to the cold. That had been the first thing she had noticed when she woke: the cold sitting on her chest like a cat. Then she had opened her eyes (and then shut and opened them again to be sure she was awake)–and it was dark.

She remembered the nightmare which was weird. She usually forgot her dreams, they faded in the morning like plastic left too long in the sun. But she could still feel the oily shadow stuffed over her face, sliding up her nostrils and forcing itself down her throat, and shuddered.

She was used to the dark. She couldn't count the number of times she had sat on rooftops at night watching over Gotham with Jade and then by herself. It had been their thing. Her and Jade would climb up onto the roof, giggling like children because that was what they were. They would curl up on the cold stone and make up names for the stars when they weren't covered by Gotham's glaucoma pollution. But now the shadowy outlines of her room unnerved her. They were menacing, like a friendly dog turned rabid. And they all seemed to lead to one place–a darker pool of black dripping from her wall. The poster.

Why was Jade here, in Gotham? Why had she been in her bedroom? Trouble followed Jade like a stalker. Or maybe it was Jade that had trouble on a leash, pulling it behind her like a tamed pet.

She sat up in bed, rubbed her eyes and stretched. She made her way to the bathroom, feet slapping on the cold floor. It was lighter in there. Grey light stretched through the foggy window that was high above her head. She looked in the mirror stared back at herself with red rimmed eyes. Her hair was tangled like rope. She looked like a junkie. She splashed water on her face and ran her fingers through her hair. Her skin felt clammy. So much had happened yesterday, she was still processing it. She was off the Team. Every time she remembered that she felt a little twinge in her lower stomach like she was being stabbed by a large needle.

She groaned, and in a surge of frustration hit the mirror, hoping it would shatter like in the movies. It didn't. Her fist just slapped wetly against the glass with a disappointing low thump. Her hand throbbed a little, but she liked the pain. It helped her keep her mind off things.

She scribbled a note and left the house before her mum woke up.

* * *

She wore a hoodie over her school shirt which she didn't think was regulation, but heck, it was comfy. She tunnelled her hands into her pockets and cut through the park. A few homeless were wrapped up like burritos on the paint-peeled park benches. It was early, about 6:00am. The grass was wet with dew. The air tasted cool and sharp.

The park was basically dead trees and rubbish-strewed pathways, but Artemis liked it anyway. There were moments in the evening where the sun's dying light crept through the park, painting bony trees red and gold like a collage of fall, and it was beautiful. Artemis found it intriguing how one simple thing could make another so beautiful. Life, she thought as she passed the open, rusty iron park gate out onto the street, is just a large number of moments strung together–it is how they intersect which is important.

The city was waking up. Joggers were out in their tight shorts with their small dogs. Shops were lifting up their heavy duty metal shutters. She walked past a construction crew gathered at the base of what was to be a new apartment block, wooden slats stacked up on the ground, and all that construction paraphernalia that looked like it had come straight out of some sci-fi novel. A cyclist whizzed past like a bird swooping.

She bought a doughnut and takeaway coffee from a small bakery a block or two from the subway. The bakery's sign was broken, and in all her time coming here, it had never been fixed. She didn't actually know the proper name of the bakery. Like other locals, she just called it the Corner Shop. It had a cracked tile floor, and the air-conditioning never worked in summer, but the coffee and food were good.

She smiled at the lady on the counter after she had paid. The woman's fists were the size of hams and her upper body could have belonged to a wrestler. Flour had found its way into the wrinkles on her forehead. But she had soft blue eyes, and always smiled back at Artemis. She looked like a strong woman, and Artemis liked those.

"Next," the woman called out as Artemis peeled away from the counter.

Artemis took a sip of her coffee, burning the roof of her mouth. But still she relished the hot caffeine, felt it moving down through her body waking her up. She took another sip. She was looking forward to the sugar fix from her doughnut. There are a few problems in life, she thought, which can be cured by nothing more than caffeine and sugar.

She started juggling her wares in order to be able to open the door to leave, but a boy held the door open for her.

"Thanks."

"Nice coffee, here," he said as she moved past him into the morning light. He had long tousled hair, like a surfer. He looked around twenty-one. He wore a striped sweater. It looked good on him.

"Uh huh," she agreed. "That's why I come here."

He smiled at her, let the door shut so they were both standing outside and put his hands in his pockets in a way that suggested he wasn't in any sort of hurry.

"I haven't seen you here before," he said. Artemis shrugged. "Let me buy you a coffee."

Artemis held up the Styrofoam cup she was holding. "I think I'm set, thanks."

He laughed. "Not now, later."

He was looking her up and down, eyes glinting. And while normally she liked flirting, she was tired, in a bad mood, and there was something about the tilt of his head, the glint in his eyes and the rough shadow on his cheeks that made her uncomfortable. She went to fold her arms then remembered that her hands were full and moved them back in front of her holding her two items out in front of her awkwardly like they were weapons.

"I think I'm a bit too young for you," she said.

"I don't mind." That wasn't creepy at all.

"I've got to go," she mumbled to him and turned to walk away. She was stopped by a grip on her left wrist. His hand was hot and sweaty clamped around her. His knuckles were white, and the grip hurt.

"Wait…" he said.

She acted before she thought. She threw her coffee at him. The lid came off as it hit him under his collar bone. Steaming coffee splashed up onto his face and down his chest, staining his sweater. He yelled out in pain and released her to clutch at his face. She kicked him in the groin, hard, smiling with grim satisfaction as her foot connected with the soft target. He moaned in pain, and dropped down to the ground with the elegance of a sack of potatoes.

"Don't touch little girls," she said.

She heard shouts from within the shop, and ducked her head, hiding her face in her hair. She ran off as the shop door jangled, and turned to see two people helping the boy to his feet, looking after her and shaking their heads. She stepped out in front of a taxi. It nudged into her hip then stopped. It blared its horn. The driver stepped out to shout at her. Every sound seemed far away, like she was underwater.

She reached the next block, ducking around a corner and resting her back against a concrete wall. Her heart was thumping so hard she thought it might jump out. Her breath rasped in her throat like sandpaper. She'd beaten people up before; it wasn't that which unnerved her. But a civilian in broad daylight? Without her mask on? Sure, he was creepy and he shouldn't have grabbed her, but did he really deserve everything that she had done? She had just… reacted. And she hated him for making her do so.

Her hands were shaking. She was still gripping the paper bag which contained the doughnut. She opened the bag and looked at it. She felt sick. She poked at it wither finger. She looked away before she threw up. There was a foul taste in her mouth. She dumped the doughnut in the next bin she came across. She wiped the residue sticky sugar onto her skirt.

* * *

She stood still on the escalator out of the subway station and let it carry her upwards. Her earbuds were in–not to listen to any music–just to deter strangers' conversation. So far, it had worked. She had calmed down from the _incident_ earlier. Sure, she had lost control, but he had deserved it anyway, right? Everything had turned out fine.

People brushed past her on her right, climbing up the escalator. There were huffs and glances when the right lane was blocked off further up by a curly haired large woman who was wearing a bright purple dress that made Artemis wince every time it caught her eye. Eventually, the woman found a space on the left to move to, and the frustrated people behind her shot forward with the zealousness of a flooding stream carving itself a new path. The air was stale and smelled of sweat as was to be expected in the Gotham subway–any subway in general. She breathed shallowly through her mouth.

Finally she was out under the open sky. The day was turning out to be beautiful. Cotton ball clouds hung in a bright blue sky. Birds dogfought in the sky, diving and twittering and weaving around each other.

Gotham Academy was only a few blocks away, and she had the time, so she meandered slowly, enjoying the sunshine. She was also, she admitted to herself, in no hurry to get there. The day before hadn't quite been a disaster, but it was pretty close to it. It didn't matter what school it was, how much it cost, how much the teachers were payed–people were people and, more often than not, people sucked.

Artemis frowned when she reached the school. There was a police car out the front. In the courtyard, students stood around socialising and lounging on the low brick walls. Artemis noticed a flurry of movement in front of her, under an ivy covered wall. It was Tack and Billy. They were waving at her. She made her way towards them.

"We took bets on whether or not you'd come back today," Tack grinned at her when she reached them.

"I won," Billy said. "I knew you didn't look like a quitter."

"It was a close call, but if there's one thing I value it's my education," Artemis said dryly.

"Oh, is that why we're here?" Tack laughed. "Personally I'm in it for Jim's short shorts and the pretty girls." He winked at Artemis. She ignored him.

"What are the police doing here?" she asked.

Tack shrugged. "Dunno. There was an old cop and a fat cop. They went into the office a while back. Haven't come out yet."

She glanced at Billy. He was quieter than usual. In the shadow of the wall, and slouched against the grey stone he almost seemed to blend into the background.

"Well aren't you curious?" she asked.

"Some kid probably stole a car or something. It happens all the time." Tack said. "Okay," he amended at her raised eyebrow, "it's happened like twice. But it's going to be something boring like that."

"How will we know until we find out?" Artemis said, her mind whirring with possibility. "Something important could be going on."

Tack lifted his arms up, stretching. "Well if you have an idea to find out, I'm down for it.

"All we need is a reason to go to the office…" Artemis said slowly.

There was a moment of silence where they all paused to think. Billy was shaking his head either in disagreement or disbelievingly, but she was pretty sure he would succumb to their peer pressure and be in on it.

They were broken out of their planning by the click-clack of heels on pavement. The students parted out of the way like it was Moses walking through, but it was only the receptionist Artemis had met the other day. She stopped when she reached them. Her glasses reflected the light for a moment and her eyes were hidden behind the shining surface.

"Come with me," the receptionist said in her abrupt way. "You're wanted in the office."

Tack snorted with laughter and turned it into a rather unconvincing cough when the receptionist looked at him. "Have fun you two," Tack waved at them and leant against the wall grinning.

"You too, Jonathon," the woman said.

His face fell and it was Artemis's turn to laugh. "Jonathon?"

"Shut up," he said.

She could feel Billy shaking with silent laughter next to her. They followed the woman to the office. Billy and Tack–Jonathon–seemed relaxed, but Artemis was on edge. If the police were in the office, and they were being taken there, then it would stand to reason that the police wanted to talk to them. But why? They'd done nothing wrong. Well she had assaulted that guy earlier, but they couldn't have heard about it by now and identified her, so what was it?

On the way they passed groups of students who turned to look at them being led toward the office. Artemis didn't want to imagine what rumours were being created.

The office sign had been fixed. They entered the office and Artemis saw that Tack's information had been correct. A fat cop sat on a chair in the waiting room. His stomach spilled over the sides. There was a stain on the front of his uniform. Artemis thought that if he stood up the chair would go with him. An older man stood in front of them. He was at least in his late fifties, maybe early sixties. He had grey hair and was balding. But his uniform was pressed and clean, buttons shiny. Badge proudly on display. He gave her a small smile as he noticed her looking. She met his eyes, and he didn't look away. Those were eyes that had seen things. He looked tired.

"This is detective Martin Capooche, and Tim Donart," the receptionist gestured at the man standing in front of them and then at the cop still slouched in the chair.

"More like Too-Many-Doughnuts, am I right?" Tack whispered in her ear.

She winced and elbowed him in the side. Now wasn't the time. She looked across and Billy. He was pale, and kept glancing down at the floor. She hadn't known him for long but that was uncharacteristic. She thought about putting her hand on his shoulder but stopped. They didn't even really know each other. And emotional support wasn't really her forte.

"These are the students I was telling you about," the woman continued. "The fourth should be here any minute. Artemis Crock, Jonathon Coulders, and William Borden." She pointed at each of them in turn.

"Call me Tack," Tack said, reaching out his hand for the old man–Capooche–to shake. To his credit, the detective didn't miss a beat.

"Pleased to meet you, Tack," he said shaking Tack's hand. He frowned, looking at Billy. "Borden…" he said.

Billy nodded, looking down. Capooche grunted.

There was an awkward silence. The other cop's belly rumbled. He blushed and patted his stomach. "Excuse me," he said.

Finally the door opened and even the receptionist let out a sigh of relief. "Here's the last," she said.

Dick Grayson stepped into the room.

"Did I miss anything?" Dick said in a way and with a smile that told Artemis he already knew the answer.

"Now that Mr Grayson is finally here, we can start," the receptionist said, ignoring his question. "But before we do, understand that nothing said in here is to go beyond this room."

Billy looked down. Dick nodded slowly. Artemis watched on.

"Why?" Tack asked.

Capooche stepped forward. "I'm here to ask you a few questions about an ongoing investigation." Doughnut snorted at 'investigation' and Capooche stared him down until he looked away and muttered an apology under his breath. "None of you are in any trouble," he said as he turned back to them. "I thought you could help me out."

"What's the investigation?" Artemis asked.

Martin Capooche sighed, and all at once Artemis felt like this was one of those intersecting moments that she had thought about earlier, a crossroads where things shifted and changed like after an earthquake. "A student, Bette Kane. She's missing."

* * *

 **A/N: Previously uploaded the wrong version missing the last part. Sorry for the wait!**

 **~WCW**


	9. Chapter 9: Back Pocket

Chapter 9: Back Pocket

"Missing? Bette?" Tack choked out each word one after another as if he didn't have the breath to form full sentences.

Billy slumped back heavily into a chair. It squeaked from his weight. Dust billowed up. Artemis's eyes prickled. She held back from sneezing, it didn't feel like an appropriate moment to do so. Leant forward, arm propping up his chin, Billy looked like an aging uncle, drunk and divorced sitting alone on Christmas day. Dick still stood with his arms folded. He looked stoic, cold even, but there was something about the slouch of his back and clench in his jaw that suggested to her that he was more ill-at-ease than he first looked.

"Her parents reported her missing this morning after she hadn't been home last night," Capooche said. "Do any of you know where she is?" He looked at each of them in turn. They all shook their heads.

Her head spun. It felt filled with cotton wool. She had been expecting something… she just hadn't been expecting this. Why did bad things happen to good people? Why was the world so cruel?

Tack was the most upset. He didn't seem to know what to do with his arms. He stretched, gestured and flapped them about like a fairground ride. He kept squeezing his hands together. Whenever he stopped, Artemis could see them shaking.

"I'm sorry you had to find out like this," Capooche said. "I was told you four were close to Miss Kane –"

"Are," Tack said.

Capooche winced and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Sorry. Are," he corrected softly. There was a small pause and Artemis could feel the rush of blood in her ears. "I was wondering if you noticed anything strange about her yesterday. Any routine she skipped, any small detail you think could be relevant."

Bette hadn't met Artemis at the gym like she said she would yesterday. Could that mean she went missing around that time? And she had mentioned that other girl, what was her name? Amalia. She was missing too wasn't she? Why hadn't the police been involved with her disappearance if it was as suspect as people seemed to think? She was dimly aware of the others shaking their heads.

"Do you think she's okay?" Tack's voice was soft and small.

Capooche looked down.

The fat cop scoffed and wrestled himself out of his chair. His cheeks were ruddy and flushed. "It hasn't even been twenty-four hours yet, there's nothing to worry about. The girl probably just went out partying like most girls her age and stayed over at someone's house…" He trailed off at Artemis's glare.

She made a small noise in the back of her throat like a territorial growl. "Most girls her age, huh?"

Capooche stepped forward and grabbed the larger man by the upper arm. "A word, Tim," he said. His voice and face were resolute as iron. Tim started to say something, seemed to think better of it, and allowed himself to be led further into the office.

Silence.

"Miss Crock," the receptionist eventually said. "That jumper isn't regulation."

Artemis nearly laughed. A student was missing and her main concern was her freaking jumper? At that she did start laughing, but cut herself off as soon as she heard herself. She sounded like a nervous, manic serial killer clown.

"When you're finished here, return to class. And remember to not tell anyone. If the situation doesn't change we'll hold an assembly tomorrow." The receptionist gave them a once over as if she suspected they would light the office on fire the second they were left alone, seemed to reassure herself they wouldn't and left the office with a swish of skirts and a click clack of heels.

The door clicked shut. It was silent. The room had an electric tension to it so palpable Artemis could feel hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Bette was missing.

Bette was missing.

"I didn't think I'd see you again so soon, and definitely…not like this," Dick moved over to them. Artemis realised that as soon as the adults had left the room they had all clustered closer together instinctively like penguins or asteroids in orbit.

"You know him?" Billy asked.

"We went out for coffee," Dick said.

"He's like thirteen!"

Artemis blushed. "No we didn't!" Dick arched an eyebrow at her. "Well we did. But not like that!"

"Bette's missing, and you're talking about coffee?" Tack said. He paced up and down in front of them, shoes squeaking on the floor.

There was an awkward silence. Artemis looked down. She hadn't known Bette for long, but Bette had been nice to her and she felt like in time they could've been close friends. Could be. She wasn't dead, just missing. And that meant she could be found.

"She's going to be fine," Artemis said.

"How do you know?" Tack's eyes were pleading, he looked like he was about to cry. God damn it, she hoped he didn't cry.

"Because I'm going to make sure she is."

"How?"

She could call the League… But no, they wouldn't help her find Bette. As harsh as it sounded: one schoolgirl's life wasn't high enough on their list of priorities. Kaldur had already told her to not contact the Team no matter what, but they might change their mind if she told them what was going on. No, she was capable, she could do this herself. And if for some reason she needed backup, she could always call Robin, he was always up for a chance to get in trouble.

"I'll find a way," she said.

He didn't look too convinced, but he didn't question her further and finally stopped his pacing. He stood still with arms by his sides like a sad broken toy.

"Going missing for no reason. Skipping school…" Billy shook his head. "That doesn't sound like Bette."

"I don't think he thinks she's missing for no reason," Dick nodded over to where Capooche was walking back. The other cop wasn't with him.

Capooche had good hearing. "No, I don't," he said. He strolled up to them, wiping his hands on the front of his uniform as if cleaning off some strange substance he found poking around where he shouldn't have been.

"What happened to Doughnut?" Tack asked. He seemed to be feeling better and had picked his unconcern regarding authority right back up.

Capooche's mouth turned up at the corners and he coughed into his hand. "My _colleague_ is on his way back to the station."

"Why?"

Capooche turned to face her. This close he actually looked younger. He had a large hawkish nose and strong cheekbones. He had looked wiry from further away, but Artemis could see his arms coiled up and tight with muscle beneath his uniform.

He paused, deciding what to say, rolling the words around in his mouth like water before eventually spitting them out like he was a wine taster. "We had a… disagreement regarding the importance of the investigation. The finding of your friend and her safety is my top priority." He pulled out a pen and a small black notebook from his back pocket. "Do you know if Bette has any history of mental illness?" he asked.

Artemis found a spot next to the wall and sat down. This was going to take a while.

* * *

"You said that Bette wasn't at your gym class?"

Artemis nodded, and Tack and Billy agreed. Dick stood to one side playing on his phone. They'd been in there for nearly an hour, and the room felt stuffy and oppressing. Sweat prickled at her underarms. She fanned her face.

Capooche grunted and frowned, leaning forward on his chair, tapping his pen against his notebook. "Are you sure?"

"Ask anyone else in the class," Tack said. "Or check the attendance. The teachers collect it every lesson, even Gym. Our teacher is meticulous. He carries it around in a black folder. If you miss two classes unexplained or forget your gear twice, detention." Tack shook his head slowly, smiling as if remembering some classic family tale. "He loves that black folder. I don't think I've ever seen him without. He even carries it with him when he's on duty in the canteen. You know, I think it makes him feel more important–"

"Thanks, Tack." Capooche cut in. He sighed and stood up, Artemis caught a glance of his notebook before he snapped it shut, page filled with small cramped writing. She imagined what his mind had found out from the interview. What theories had made it onto the page in ink, which were still circling his mind? "Well I think I've held you all up enough for today."

"Yeah, we'd better get back to class. If there's one thing we value, it's our education." Tack said. He tried a smile but it looked sickly, like a wilting plant. Artemis forced out a laugh, but cut it off quickly when she heard its strained sound.

Capooche smiled sympathetically and pulled out four business cards, handing one to each of them. "If you think of, or remember anything else, call me."

They all stood up and shook his hand. Artemis's left leg was numb from the way she had been sitting and she wobbled as she stood. Dick put his hand on her arm until she was steady. She glanced at him, but he was already looking away, as if helping her had been as instinctive and easy as breathing.

Tack thanked the policeman for his help. Capooche sighed. "Just doing my job," he said.

Capooche opened the door and Billy, Tack and Dick walked through while Artemis hung back.

"Why were you surprised when I told you Bette wasn't at Gym?" She asked Capooche after the others had passed. She kept quiet so they wouldn't hear–maybe he would open up to just her. "Shouldn't that have been the first thing you checked with the school, when she went missing?" It was just a hunch that he was hiding something, the way his eyes tightened when she told him Bette wasn't at Gym, like he hadn't believed her or that it meant something hugely important. Maybe he would open up to her.

His eyes tightened again. A small almost unseeable squint which caused his laugh lines to bunch up. Bingo. "I wasn't surprised," he said. He was lying.

She shook her head. "You know something, something else,"

Capooche looked her in the eyes again and she knew she was right. She could see the secrets swimming in his eyes like sharks. He sighed and pulled something out of his pocket turning it over in his fingers. She couldn't make out what it was.

"I can't tell you. I'm not involving you kids," he said more to himself than her.

"Hey Artemis, you coming?" Tack's voice yelled out.

"Just a minute," she called back. She narrowed her eyes at Capooche. "You were the one who brought us here in the first place," she said, hands on hips.

His hand moved again and Artemis could see that he was flipping a pack of cigarettes over and over again in his hand like how a magician absentmindedly handles his cards. He glanced down to where she was looking, and immediately stopped. It was a nervous habit, she realised. He looked wistfully down at the cigarettes and then shoved the pack back into his pocket.

"It was a bad idea," he said gruffly. "But I want to let you know that I'm doing everything I can to find your friend."

"Except using our help."

"I know this is hard for you, having your friend missing. And I know you want to help more. But I'm trained for this, and I've spent half my life doing this. This is my job. You don't want what this job brings, Artemis. Let me do my job. I'll find your friend. You just focus on being a kid…" He trailed off. His face turned pale, his cheeks looked like they were made of plastic. He leant back against the wall as if he didn't have the strength to stand up. He clutched his right hand into a fist, knuckles white with force. He grunted in pain.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

He put his head down, his jaw clenched. He dragged his hands across his face. His legs shook. Eventually the fit, or whatever it was, seemed to pass. She grabbed his shoulder and side and helped him back to his full height. As she did so, she slipped the notebook out of his back pocket and up under her shirt, tucking it into the waist of her skirt. Robin had taught her a few sleight of hand tricks. She felt guilty, Capooche was likeable and he obviously cared about helping Bette. But if he wouldn't give her the answers she was asking for, she would have to take them.

"Thank you," he said hoarsely. "I'm okay." He didn't sound like he believed it. There were small red crescents on the palm of his right hand from where his fingernails had dug in.

"What is it?" she asked. He hadn't felt sick. She had carried sick people before, had seen them in the hospital. His muscles weren't atrophied like a cancer patient; he looked healthy, felt strong. But obviously something was wrong.

He didn't answer for a while. His face was slowly filling back up with colour like a balloon being inflated. "Nothing good," he said eventually.

There was an awkward pause. "Artemis, hurry up!" Tack called out to her again.

He motioned her away. "Go to your friends." He frowned to himself. "You've already helped enough." He reached to his side. Artemis winced, if he checked his back pocket she'd be caught out. But he reached into his other pocket, the one with the cigarettes and she relaxed.

She nodded and smiled at him, and she walked out of the office slowly, forcing herself to not to run unless she give herself away. She reached Tack and Billy standing sullen in the hallway, Dick wasn't there.

"Where's Dick?" she asked.

Billy shrugged. "Guess he got tired of waiting." Whatever, she told herself. But something about that stung her and she didn't know why.

"Wait!" A voice called out from behind them. She turned to see Capooche hurrying out the door towards them. He already looked much better, as if the fit had never happened. But she could see his ill health now in the shadows of his eyes and off-beat gait. It was like when finding a stain on a shirt: it was hard to see before, but now that she had seen it her eyes were drawn to it until it was almost like there was nothing else there. He must have found the notebook missing and known someone had taken it. Her heart jumped in her chest like it had been kicked by an angry horse. She opened her mouth to deny everything.

"Could I have a word, Billy?" Capooche asked.

What? She shut her mouth. Capooche must have caught her looking at him strangely because he nodded at her reassuringly. She forced herself to not duck away, and nodded back.

"And what if I say no?" Billy said. His arms were folded and feet set into the ground like posts. He was ready for a fight.

Capooche's shoulders lifted minutely, as if he were breathing deeply. "Then you say no. But I'd appreciate it if you said yes."

Slowly the fight drained out of Billy. The posts wilted back into legs, and his arms dropped back to his sides. "See you guys later," he muttered to them, and trudged back into the office, Capooche following closely behind.

"What took you so long anyway?" Tack asked after Billy left. "Did he tell you anything else about Bette?"

"No," she said. She brushed her arm back against her side to remind herself Capooche's notebook was still there. But I hope he will soon.

* * *

 **A/N: Things are heating up ;)**

 **Also, in case you haven't heard, we're getting a third Young Justice season! Once again, thank you all for your comments.**

 **~WCW**


	10. Chapter 10: Truancy101

Chapter 10: Truancy101

"This is scary," Tack said as they walked down the corridor.

"What is?" Artemis said. The notebook pressed uncomfortably against her stomach like a secret trying to escape. Her fingers itched to open it-they actually twitched down by her side. It could be the key to finding Bette.

"You know what." Tack tugged on the straps of his backpack. "All of this. I mean, you see it on the news all the time. You know… so and so has been stabbed or shot or kidnapped. I just never thought this could happen to people like us-completely ordinary and boring."

Artemis nearly guffawed, but stopped herself. Tack was just a kid. He was the same age as her, maybe older. But to her that was what he was. He hadn't had her level of training to not freeze or freak out in a situation like this. And that was what he was doing, she realised freaking out. She panicked for a moment; she wasn't the best comforting person in the world, Gotham, or even probably this hallway. She tried her best to play the voice of reason.

"First of all we don't know about anything that's happened to Bette. And there's no use speculating, we'll just psych ourselves out. Bette's going to be okay. That cop seemed good at his job."

"Yeah, unlike the other one."

Tack walked slowly—less because they weren't in a hurry but more because it seemed the fastest he could manage. His legs poking out from his shorts looked limp and pale, like vegetables left out in the heat in a plastic bag. She had to force herself to slow down so as to not outpace him.

"I wonder what they're talking about," Artemis tried to change the topic.

"Who?"

"Billy and Capooche." She thought back to the way Billy seemed nervous. No, not seemed, was. There was something extra going on there. She just didn't know what. She nearly sighed. There seemed to be a lot she didn't know about these days.

"Who?"

"The cop."

"Wait that was his name? I thought he was ordering a coffee or something."

Artemis saw the glint in Tack's eye. She had never thought he was dumb, but now she wondered how obtuse he really was, and how much he put on. Tack seemed to communicate solely in puns, humour, and sarcasm. But underneath all of that he was… something. He was like an iceberg: unrevealing, and potentially, dangerous. She reminded herself how little she knew of him.

"Enemies often come to you wearing the face of friends," her father had told her once. And while not a paragon of advice, some of his darker, dirtier advice had proven true before.

She had been thinking about sharing the notebook with Tack, telling him she found it on the floor somewhere, but now she thought better of it. Besides, he and Billy and Dick hadn't had the same training as her. Robin might be the sleuth of the Team, but maybe she could be the sleuth of Gotham Academy.

"I'm going to the bathroom," she told Tack. "I'll come in later. Cover with Beige for me?" She smiled sweetly at him, already turning to walk away.

"You're going to get me in trouble!" He called. But she knew he would do it for her. The answer was plain in his voice.

She reached for the notebook beneath her shirt like Martin Capooche reaching nervously for his cigarettes.

"I'm going to get myself in trouble," she muttered. She looked up to see if Tack had heard her, but he had already turned his back to her, and was walking away.

* * *

She had done her fair share of skipping school in Gotham North. If truancy was a school course, she'd have straight A's.

Truancy101: the key to not being caught is to make sure you look like you have a purpose to be wherever you were. If someone looks guilty –well, they probably are.

This was easy for Artemis. She always had a purpose, skipping school to take the bus three hours out of town on a nice day to go swimming in a river, sneaking out of class to hang out at the abandoned old quarry, throwing glass bottles over the edge and waiting to see if they could see them smash down at the bottom. They never could.

It would be easier in a school where the teachers didn't know her yet. In Gotham North any sign of her out of a classroom probably meant she wasn't where she was supposed to be. Not that the teachers cared particularly much. (They were the type of balding, single, middle-aged-men who had once had dreams about revitalising the poverty in Gotham from the education system upwards, who had eventually realised they couldn't combat abusive step-fathers and heroin from classrooms and had given up all hope of anything.)

Okay, so maybe she was being dramatic, they weren't all bad. But still, since she was new to Gotham Academy, any teacher who asked where she was going, she could just tell them she was lost, on the way to wherever and would they would kindly give her directions. Then she would say "thank you so much, I would be wandering around here forever unless I found you!" or something as equally vomit inducing, and she would walk off, then eventually double back to wherever she wanted to be going.

But she didn't pass anyone in the hallways to question her movements.

There was a strange feeling inside her as she walked toward the library (she had decided the library would be the best notebook perusal location). She felt guilty, she realised. After everything her and her mother had been through, this school might be the luckiest thing to happen to them. She knew how much it meant for her mother, and here she was, not even past the first week and she was skipping class.

She tried to assure herself that these were extenuating circumstances; she was trying to help someone–in fact, it would be downright _irresponsible_ to go to class and not investigate the notebook… that she'd stolen… from a police officer.

If she found nothing she could always go back to class later… right? But she was already here now: outside the library. She pulled out the notebook. What should she do?

"Aren't you meant to be in English?" The voice came from right next to her, and startled she dropped the notebook on the floor. Why hadn't she heard him walk up? She scrabbled to pick the notebook up, but a tanned hand plucked it up before she could reach it. She looked up at a crouching Dick Grayson. "Hi," he said.

"What are you doing here?" Artemis grabbed for the notebook. Dick pulled it out of the way. Why was he so _damned_ fast?

"I could ask you the same question." He put on an exaggerated thinking expression. "Oh wait… I already did." He stood up, brushing off his knees.

"Give me back my notebook!" Artemis huffed, standing too.

" _Your_ notebook." Dick's tone was dry and he raised an eyebrow. "But it says here it's the property of Martin Capooche, Detective Inspector, Gotham Police," he had opened up the front page and was reading off the details. "Wait… do you want _your_ phone number too?" Dick bowed exaggeratedly. "I'm so sorry, Mr. Capooche, this was just a case of mistaken identity."

"It's second-hand," muttered Artemis. There was still a chance Dick had forgotten Capooche's name after meeting him earlier that day.

"By second-hand you mean stolen, right?"

Nope, no chance. She was screwed.

She went into full damage control. "After I left, I found it on the floor, he must've dropped it. And then I went to give it back to him, but the door was closed and he and Billy were having an intense discussion by the looks of it through the window. And of course I didn't want to leave the notebook just lying about, it probably has sensitive information in it, and anyone could have picked it up."

"Of course," said Dick. "What's next?" He moved over to the wall, gesturing with the notebook, just out of reach. Artemis's eyes followed it, like a cat looking at a laser dot. "I'm intrigued." He covered a yawn behind his hand.

"What do you mean?"

"So you pick up the notebook, what's next."

"Well, I… waited outside the office for a bit, hoping to give it back after they had finished –"

"Naturally," Dick interjected.

"Do you want to know or what?"

She could feel herself growing more and more annoyed. She felt like she was being toyed with. She had been on the back foot from the start and now Dick was pressing his advantage.

"Your made up story? I prefer the works of Cormac McCarthy and Richard Ford–great realists… Get it, because your _story_ is fictitious."

"Thanks, I got it."

"So you admit it's a lie."

"No. As I was saying, I waited outside the office for a bit–"

"Well that I know is a lie," Dick said.

"What?" She hurriedly tried to control her facial features, but she knew she had shown a tell there somewhere. Her eyelid twitched. "Nice try," she said. She flipped her hair over her shoulder to try to hide her unease, but when she looked back, Dick's mouth had tightened and his eyes glinted with a predatory gleam–he had seen the guilt, and now was going in for the kill.

"After we had finished the meeting and the others were waiting for you, I went to the bathroom, and wandered back in time to see Billy being 'taken in' and you leaving with Tack. I followed behind you, and was about to catch-up to you when you went off in a random direction." Dick shrugged, "I followed you and here we are."

"That proves nothing," she said. But she sounded unconvincing even to herself.

"Look, let's just skip to the part where you admit to it, and then we can read the notebook together."

"Why would I do that?

"Or, if you'd rather," Dick continued. "I can go and hand this notebook in to reception right now and explain how I found it."

"You wouldn't do that."

"Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn't. But do you want to risk it for Bette's sake. You did steal it to help Bette, right?" He looked at her, no longer like a teasing schoolboy leaning against a wall but deep and deadly serious. "I want to help her too," he said.

She looked at him, eyes bright and blue and completely empty of guile. Did she really have a choice? He tilted his head, unmoving. But could she trust him to not say anything?

"Borrowed," she said. "I borrowed it. _We're_ giving it back later."

Dick's face broke into a grin. "Whatever you say." He gestured at the library. "Lead on. And keep your hands away from my textbooks, those things are expensive."

She looked back at him and rolled her eyes. He raised his hands in mock surrender.

Why did she just feel like she had made a terrible mistake? For probably the first time in her life, she had placed her trust in a complete stranger. Okay, she had been blackmailed; maybe trust wasn't the right word. She didn't like others having this sort of power over her. She felt like her hands were tied behind her back and her choices were made for her. She squeezed her eyes shut briefly and then reopened them and walked into the library, refusing to acknowledge Dick. This wasn't going to end well.

* * *

She slipped lithely through the library doors and was in-between the stacks, moving in a loping way that looked relatively normal, and wouldn't draw attention unlike a sprinting girl in a library, but would still eat up ground. She used it out on the streets, particularly at night when a running figure drew a lot more attention. Maybe if she got far enough away from Dick, all her problems would disappear. But that was stupid. And besides, he still had the notebook. She turned around to let him catch up to her, but found him next to her.

"Save the running for the gymnasium, Artemis. This is a library, in case you hadn't noticed, the home of knowledge and erudition."

She looked at him, and he looked back straight faced. Damn! Why did it seem she couldn't read anyone at the moment? Everyone might as well be wearing the faces of mannequins for all she could gather from them. And Dick seemed more cryptic than most.

"Doesn't look like much," she lied.

She was impressed. She had half expected the library to be dusty and full of cobwebs and secrets. It wasn't. Well, it wasn't so far, but secrets did have a way of staying hidden for a while at least.

The stacks stretched high, about two metres, filled end to end with books. Wood was everywhere. Wooden panels covered the walls. And the book stacks were wooden and glowed golden in the light streaming in through the windows.

For a private school, it was a massive collection. The air was cool and it moved softly through the library. She looked up and found hidden fans along the lip of the ceiling.

See? Secrets.

"I know a good spot," Dick said.

She followed him, running her fingers over the spines of books as they made their way through the stacks and up a cramped stone spiral staircase half hidden in the corner.

She had never spent much time in libraries. She had always been pushed towards the outside and her physicality. Her father had trained her body much more than he had trained her brain. But there was something about books that had always appealed to her.

Books could take you away from everything for a little while. It was always something she wished she had had more in her childhood. Besides, she was a sucker for an Austen.

The second floor was smaller, but still brightly lit. What immediately stood out was the whole wall of glass at one end of the room. This must be a study floor . Desks and chairs covered the floor space, partitioned by a few smaller stacks of books. Dick led the way down toward a corner next to the glass window-wall. It boasted more comfortable chairs, beanbags and a fluffy white carpet, partially hidden by the rest of the library by shelves of magazines. It looked cosy.

There was a blue couch that looked like you could sink into it. Dick took one end of, bag down at his feet, notebook in hand. Artemis sat next to him, already looking at the notebook.

"Shall we?" Asked Dick.

Artemis nodded. Her throat felt sandpapery. She was perched on the edge of the couch like an eagle about to take off. She couldn't stop her leg from jigging. She felt strangely nervous.

Dick set the notebook down between them, and she leaned over to get a better look. Crossed her legs. Brushed hair out of her eyes. He opened to the front page which he had already read out to her. The paper was cream coloured and smooth. Capooche's name and title was printed clearly in neat cursive. That neat cursive disappeared into the cramped writing she had glimpsed earlier before she had taken the notebook when Dick turned the page.

Dick kept flicking the pages before she could read anything. She was about to stop him, when she saw his fingers running over the top right of every page before he turned in. She looked closer. Dates. Of course.

Dick stopped at a page. He pointed at a scrawled line above the rest. Artemis squinted at it.

"What does it say?" she asked.

"The disappearance of Elizabeth Kane," Dick said.

"Not ominous at all," Artemis joked trying to sound light hearted. But the words fell flat, and rang empty in the air above them like a warning bell.

She squinted at the messy scrawl:

 _6:34am first call from JULIA Kane about missing Elizabeth 'Bette' Kane._ _Check transcripts_ _(Bet. not home that night. Unusual for her. No history of drugs. No police record. No medical issues known. Has good friends at school Gotham Academy - (kidnapping $$?) (Tack,_ _William Borden,_ _mentioned a nice new girl? – question re. friendships warning signs/mental illness history?)_

 _6:40am called school. Check attendance records. Checked. Bette takes subway to get home. Check cctv at station._

 _Meeting with B. friends. Nothing of use. Schedule another appoint. w/family._

She couldn't read the rest of it, what she could see was a mixture of arrows and underlining and circling. It was a flow chart that made no sense. What was clear was that Martin Capooche didn't know very much.

Dick was still reading, frowning down at the notebook as if he could scare it into giving up its secrets. He finally looked up to her. He was still frowning.

"Well that wasn't helpful, Artemis said."

"Didn't you say Bette wasn't at Gym?" he asked.

"Yeah," said Artemis.

"So," said Dick pointing at one of the sections she hadn't been able to make out. "Why does it say here that she attended all of her classes yesterday?"

"I... What?" She leaned in closer to see what it said, and sure enough, squeezed down in the bottom corner connected by a strenuous line to 'check attendance records' was: 'not absent from class. request transcript.' "Damn," said Artemis, that was why Capooche had acted so surprised when she had told him! They had a lead!

"No, not damn," Dick said, grinning and standing up. "We have a lead."

Outside the window the trees shook in the wind, leaves clinking together like coins. White clouds threaded across the sky.

The bell rang.

"Meet me outside the school tonight, in the park across the road." Dick said.

"Why?" Artemis asked.

"Because," Dick said. "We're going to break into the office."


	11. Chapter 11: Dramatic Inclination

**Trigger Warning:** this chapter contains pretty graphic scenes of **domestic abuse**. _I tried writing the scenes without them, but they didn't feel realistic enough. _I didn't just stick these scenes on to horrify readers or for added emotional content, these scenes are pretty important for characterisation, and later chapters._ _

_For the first time, some scenes will be told from someone other than Artemis's POV. Let me know what you think about it in the comments._

 _Quotes have been used from Othello Act V scene ii_

* * *

Chapter 11: Dramatic Inclination

"Break into the office?" Artemis thrust her finger at Dick's chest like a fencer scoring a hit. "Do you want to be expelled?"

"Relax, I've done it before. No one will even know we're there."

"You've done it… Ugh I give up." She snatched the notebook from Dick's hand and put it into her bag, slinging it back onto her shoulder with a huff.

"See you at ten," he called out to her.

She mumbled something foul under her breath, but didn't contradict him. Without saying goodbye, she left towards the staircase. She blew a strand of hair out of her face. She could feel his smirk boring into her, and sure enough, when she turned her head and looked back, he was looking at her. Their eyes locked, and his smile grew wider. And then she was taking the staircase two at a time and striding out of the library.

She was nearly late for Drama. And by God, when Artemis Crock decided to go to class, she was _punctual_.

* * *

Billy wanted to hit something. He wanted to pound his fists into a wall until something broke. Most of all he wanted to wipe that 'fatherly' look of concern off Marty Capooche's face. He snorted. If there was anything to be said about a look of concern, it wasn't fatherly. Not for him anyway.

"No one's tried to contact me," he heard himself say. The last letter he had received from his mother was two weeks ago, telling him she'd talk to him soon. And then nothing. He sometimes felt like he was down a well, screaming for help while other people walked past above, visible in a crescent of light, oblivious to him down below. He just wanted something to happen. He was sick of all this waiting.

"But if they do, let me know, alright?" Capooche rested his hand on his shoulder.

"Yeah, yeah whatever." Billy shrugged and Capooche's hand slid off like a wet fish.

"This is no laughing matter, Billy. Your father has a lot of friends. Dangerous people who would be happy to keep you quiet by any means possible. Or people who would be happy seeing you father imprisoned, and will use you to gain leverage over him or his organisations."

Capooche was looking older than ever. Billy thought that if he looked closely enough he could see entirely through Capooche's hands and out the other side as if they were glass.

He compared him to the Capooche he had first met a year or so ago, standing at the front door, police hat tucked under his arm like a football. Billy had peeked at him from out his bedroom window, hiding behind the curtains like a child. Capooche had looked sturdy and strong, a comforting reliable presence, everything his father wasn't.

He had come to tell Billy ("I'm so sorry to inform you") that his father was a bad man. That police knew about the bad things he had done. That he had been arrested in town, that they needed more evidence.

Billy had known that his father was a bad man. How could he not have known? He had been there for the nightly shouting in the kitchen, and the dull thuds of fists hitting flesh. Muted sobbing from his mother slumped on the floor like a broken ballerina, painfully thin, arms sticking out like they were broken. They never were of course–his father always made sure of that. Except that one time, but no, he didn't want to think about that.

Every bruise, nearly every bruise, every drunken slash of belt strap was calculated to be hidden from view. When his father paraded his family at ballroom galas, champagne flowing like tap water, nothing could be seen amiss.

He father was so full of rage, small but compact with fists like bricks, and a clove-scented cigarette that was always lit sticking out between his teeth, smoking like the nostril of a dragon.

He used to get nightmares about his father, vivid flashes that were lifelike–almost like memories, which had him waking up thrashing, soaked through with sweat. They had thankfully stopped right before the trial.

"We'll do whatever we can to lock that bastard away for life," his mother had said.

Billy used to think that in the study (the room with the shiny wooden door that was always locked) his father had life-sized dummies that he beat into pulp instead of him or his mother. As it turned out, it was just filled with documents and financial records of criminal activities: drugs, human trafficking, prostitution … all that jazz.

"Billy?" Capooche was looking at him again in that concerned way. Billy didn't want his pity. He wanted… he didn't know what he wanted.

"Yeah. Yeah, sure." he said, when he realised he had left the question unanswered for too long. "I'll let you know."

He had pretty much missed English by now–yep, there was the bell. "I'm sorry for taking up so much of your time."

"Only school," Billy said. He couldn't look Capooche in the eyes; he looked at the desk, the fan. He noticed a spot of mud on Capooche's shoes.

"Just wait until a few months after sentencing, Billy. Then we can get you out of here."

"I'd better go," Billy said, he throat felt like it would close up and he would suffocate to death. "I …" he couldn't finish. He didn't know what he was going to say anyway.

"Billy…" Capooche began.

But he was already out the office door.

* * *

It was a strange classroom. Raised tiered block seating overlooked a stage area. There was a second room nearly as big as the first which she had peeked into on the way in, which was filled with dusty props, electrical equipment, and painted backdrops. Heavy lights swung from metal bars up near the ceiling, operated by an unmanned booth behind the tiered seating.

Artemis felt instantly out of place, taking a seat up the far back. It was a small class. No more than fourteen or fifteen students. The lack of jocks in the room was apparent. Smaller, lankier, nerdier students were scattered haphazardly in small groups across the seating. She was confused, why weren't more jocks in the class? Drama was a bludge, and a truth universally acknowledged, was that jocks were tempted by a free ride.

"Right." A man strode into the room, clicked his fingers twice. "You know the drill. Practice your duologues. Performances will be at the end of class." He wore a buttoned-up coat, tortoiseshell framed glasses. His hair looked windswept, and he calmed it down with his hands, while the class went into a bundle of activity, partners searching for partners. Artemis sat in the middle of it all, completely bewildered while everyone grew settled. She wasn't an idiot. She knew that duo meant two. But it seemed that everyone else already had someone else, that this was something they had previously been working on.

Practices began: a mumble of dramatically explained voices. A girl with wild frizzy hair next to Artemis was discussing in depth with her partner the way body language should be portrayed throughout the piece. The girl looked over and saw Artemis looking at her, smiled sweetly, and then turned her attention back to her partner. Everywhere Artemis looked, students were hard at work.

She stepped down, to the teacher at the front, who sat on a chair, legs crossed laptop perched on his lap. "Yes?" he said when she reached him.

"Sorry, I recently transferred here, and I don't have a partner."

"No partner, no performance. No performance, no grade. Miss one grade without medical documentation, you fail my class." Right. Not much of a bludge after all.

"I…"

"Luckily, Mr. Borden, although late, appears to have arrived." He motioned towards the doorway, and Artemis looked over to see Billy framed in the doorway, bag hanging low in one hand. He looked… shaken. She wondered what Capooche had said to him.

The teacher continued. "Seeing as Elizabeth hasn't given us the pleasure of doing the same, it looks like Billy is in the same predicament as you."

Capooche's words in his notebook flashed before Artemis. 'The disappearance of Elizabeth Zane.' She grabbed her backpack reflexively.

Artemis felt a sudden surge of anger at the way his words had been phrased, as if it was Bette's fault she wasn't there. If he knew the real reason Bette wasn't there, he wouldn't be so uncaring. "I'm sure Bette has her reasons–"

"–Which she can explain to me herself at a later date. Artemis… It is Artemis isn't it? I suggest you get started. You will have had much less time to practice than the others." He gave her a glance up and down. "And you aren't as dramatically inclined."

"Excuse me?"

"Sorry, did I mumble? I said you aren't dramatically inclined, I can tell these things you know. I _am_ a drama teacher." He turned back to his computer, seemingly absorbed in it, and Artemis knew she had been dismissed.

Ugh. She huffed, and stomped away to the doorway to retrieve Billy. She'd show the teacher dramatically inclined!

* * *

Billy sat in silence as Artemis fumbled through her lines. They'd be going at it for half an hour with little sign of improvement. Billy's mind swam, doing laps, thrashing about inside his head. He felt like… a dandelion that had been blown apart like a starburst, scattered, unable to pull everything back together.

"It'd be easier if this wasn't written in fricking old English."

He dug is fingernails into his palm. "It isn't," he said, forcing himself back to the present. Artemis was sitting looking glumly at her page of lines, tapping a pen against her teeth. "You wouldn't be able to read old English. Shakespeare is the beginning of modern English."

Artemis glared at him. "Then what in the heck is a strumpet anyway?"

"A prostitute, or a uh… promiscuous woman."

"Huh. I thought it was one of those sea things that sticks itself to rocks. I guess it makes a bit more sense now"

Billy looked at her, and then took her piece of paper looking through. "Okay, we might be in a bit more trouble than I thought."

"And look! She just sits there and waits for him to kill her!"

"Well, it's open to interpretation. You can struggle around a bit…"

"Isn't Othello meant to be black? How are you going to get around that, Borden?"

"I think there's a specific word for people who paint their faces black, and it's not culturally inclusive. Artistic _interpretation_ , Artemis. Why are you in drama anyway? You're going to fail me." He was smiling now, actually enjoying the back and forth between them. He felt like he was building something back up out of little wooden blocks.

"Hey, you'd fail automatically without me here. Maybe there was a reason _your_ previous partner skipped out on you." Billy paused at that. There was a moment of silence. Artemis's face paled and contorted into a pained expression. "Oh god. I didn't mean that."

"I know," Billy said. The blocks crumbled.

It was awkward now. She couldn't even look at him. "Hey, it's fine," he said. But it wasn't. And he knew she knew it too.

He felt a stab of pain. He realised he was still pushing his fingernails into his palm. He relaxed his hand, and his fingers dropped away to reveal pale crescents. The skin around them was red and angry. He watched as the crescents filled back up like they were blushing. He felt this weird surge inside him while looking down at his hand. He felt like it was someone else's hand. That he wasn't really there. Or that he was all wrapped in gladwrap like a mummy, unable to breathe. And somehow he knew that if he tried to claw his way out of it, it would just stretch and stick to him like toffee. Everything looked far away and dull. His ears felt full of water. Something echoed dimly.

"Billy. Billy." Artemis was in front of him looking at him strangely. She clicked her fingers again. "You okay? You seem really out of it."

He was fine. He was completely fine. He went to tell her that, but he was cut off by Mr Vasquez's echoing voice calling them all back together. "I hope you all are ready, because even if you aren't, you're performing today." His eyes flashed to stare directly at them. "No. Exceptions."

Billy looked at Artemis and saw what he was sure was his own terrified, nervous, sick-to-the-stomach expression mirrored back at him.

"We'll be fine," he said.

"Sure," Artemis said. But she didn't look like she believed him. And if he was honest, he didn't believe himself either.

* * *

Artemis clapped along with the class, and shared a nervous glance with Billy. The performers blushed and took bows. Mr Vasquez (she had learned his name from Billy earlier) was enigmatic, clapping politely along with the rest of the class before eyeing the marking sheets in front of him, and attacking them with red pen.

She leant across to whisper to Billy, brushing her hair back when some of it fell into his face. "Ours is _so_ much better," she joked.

"Yea–" his voice caught in his throat. He cleared his throat, and shifted in his seat. "Yeah," he said again. "So much better."

"Billy and Artemis, since you seem to enjoy talking so much–why don't you express that in your performance? Which you will be doing now. Come on," he encouraged when neither of them stood up, in what seemed to be his permanently dry voice, "get down here, we don't have all day."

Her palms sweated and she wiped them on her skirt as she stood up. Her heart was racing. She _hated_ public speaking and this was ten times worse. She hadn't even signed up for this class!

Come on, she was a superhero in training! She tried to console herself. But that just made her wish for the anonymity of her mask, and the straightforward task of hunting some robber through the night-streets of Gotham.

"Just remember your lines, and say them at the right time," Billy whispered across to her. "Drama is actually my thing, I'll do the rest."

She nodded back, too nervous to respond verbally.

"Hey Mr Vasquez, could I borrow your lighter and someone turn out the lights?" Billy asked.

"Is it so you can have a nervous puff of a cigarette, Billy?" The class laughed, and even Artemis felt herself smile.

"It's for artistic expression."

"Well in that case, I'd give you a cigarette too, if I had anyway. Don't look too hopeful, Dean." A small fair-haired boy with glasses down the front blushed. The class laughed again. "Lights, Jenny." Jenny, a slender girl who swayed like a willow tree in the wind, walked over to where presumably the light switch was found.

The room was plunged into black.

"Lie down, remember," Billy whispered to her. "And remember when to wake up."

She nodded to him, and lay down on the floor, looking up into the dark. The floor was surprisingly cold. Goose bumps spread out along her arms. She couldn't stop shaking. That was the nerves. It wasn't like the room had grown hypothermic.

"Keep your hands to yourself Dean!" Vasquez called. Artemis choked down her laughter. "When you're ready, Artemis and Billy. Sooner rather than later."

Artemis heard Billy take one long deep breath. And then his face was illuminated by the lighter, held in his left hand and cupper with his right. His face was nearly unrecognisable with the shadows curling across the edge of his jaw, and pooling in the sockets of his eyes.

She remembered she was meant to be asleep and shut her eyes. Billy's voice rang out, echoing out to the back of the seats, wracked with inner pain and turmoil and indecision.

"It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul, /  
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!"

She zoned out, pacing her breath to the cadence of Billy's voice when she was startled by his face close to hers, hot lips pressing down on the corner of her cheek next to her mouth. She tried to pass it off as restlessness, and shifted softly, letting her hair fall down to hide her face.

Billy continued his monologue, voice dripping with the emotion of the words. She felt herself pulled along by his voice, making her empathise with a man toying with the idea of killing his wife. Maybe Shakespeare wasn't so bad after all.

So enrapt by Billy's performance, she nearly missed her queue to wake. She opened her eyes to the lighter-lit Billy. She searched for some shared sense of camaraderie. But it was entirely hidden away by the shadow-licked façade of Othello.

"Who's there? Othello?" Her words sounded flat to her, especially compared to Billy's enunciation which made every word sound like a private thought or thread of whisper, but at the same time was sent out like a casted fishing line so even the furthest audience member could still hear him.

She slowed down her breathing, pretended she was in the middle of a stressful fight, and said her lines with perfect mediocrity, letting Billy carry the performance.

She searched continually for Billy throughout every line, and every plea Desdemona made was Artemis's own searching for her friend.

But Billy didn't answer. He wasn't there.

* * *

He was lost. Othello drove him. It was all some small part of him could do to huddle away in the corner of his mind, like a child crouched under the shower wearing all of his clothes and watch on. He could see the shadows wince.

"Therefore confess thee freely of thy sin; / For to deny each article with oath / Cannot remove nor choke the strong conception / That I do groan withal. Thou art to die."

Her eyes were wide, as she reached out a pale hand towards his chest like a falling handkerchief.

* * *

The light was bright, and flickered every minute or so. He could see the death-shadows of moths stuck inside the light fixing.

Billy stood in the kitchen. He was dressed in his best shirt. It was too big for him, and the cuffs were turned up at the ends. The collar was scratchy. The dinner was burning, and bubbling over at the stove. He wanted to turn it off, but he couldn't reach high enough to turn the dial, and his mother had told him not to go near the stove when it was on. So he just watched as their meal frothed over the side of the saucepan in dirty brown bubbles, like the frog eggs he found down at pond. For some reason he was holding a candle.

He heard voices and a faint tinkling sound coming from the dining room. He stepped carefully over the remains of a porcelain vase lying on the floor, and the discarded yellow tulips that looked sickly and bruised.

"Mama? Papa?" He called out, voice small and deadened, like a spark going out.

Voices echoed from the dining hall, and Billy looked nervously around the corner. His father was on the floor with his mother as if in a loving embrace. Billy inched closer, little shiny shoes one step in front of the other. One of his laces had come undone.

His father shook his mother by the shoulders. "You slept with him, didn't you, you little slut." Billy didn't know what the word meant.

His mother's eyes opened. They were puffed and swollen. Her lip was split. She moaned and mumbled something. His father's eyes were wide as saucer plates. His teeth were bared and as sharp as knives

"William… Go. Go… to your room." His mother groaned, when she noticed him standing there.

"Shut up, woman." His father grabbed her by the throat like he was holding a balloon. Her face turned red, and she gasped out a choking sound like a car dying. "Come here, son." He lunged out and grabbed Billy by the wrist in a vice. His knuckles were split and bloodied. "I want you to watch. Watch what happens when someone betrays me."

Billy struggled as his father transferred his grip to the back of Billy's neck, digging into him like the talons of a hunting bird. His mother was crying.

"Out, strumpet! weep'st thou for him to my face?"

Billy clenched all of his muscles with all of his might and screamed. His mother kicked his father in his shins.

"Down, strumpet!"

His father let him go.

"But while I say one prayer," she said.

All the lights wavered, blinking on and off. His father swept his hand down the dining table. The crockery smashed against the floor like rain drops.

"It is too late," Billy whispered hoarsely.

Then his hands were wrapped around his father's neck, candle dropped to the floor and extinguished immediately like it had fallen into water, house lights turning off with it. And he was squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. And his father was writhing underneath him like water, neck slender between his hands, whispering out "Billy. Billy. Stop."

Wait. He felt the breath knocked out of him. His head spun from something landing on his chin. His ears rang. Where was he? Everything was dark. Someone was beneath him. Wait, no they were on top of him. His arm was pulled behind his back. He thought he heard something break. He felt like he should be in pain.

Then he was.

Seething rending pain in his right shoulder arrived like lightning and rushed through his body in blinding waves. It was all he could do not to scream. He gritted his teeth. Bit his tongue. His blood tasted like iron mixed with saltwater. His face was wet and swollen.

Something was rolling in his ears like the sea.

* * *

"But while I say one prayer!" Artemis shouted, looking Billy. His eyes were primal. The lighter flame flickered inside his black pupil. Tears were running down his face.

"It is too late," he growled hoarsely, he reached his hands down to her neck, his body weight was on top of hers pushing her down into the floor. The lighter fell from his fingers, plunging the room into darkness. She saw little green spots from the afterimage of the light.

She relaxed her whole body and let out a sigh. Applause rolled loudly from the class. Finally, it was over.

Her neck constricted. She froze up. What was Billy doing? It was over. The performance was over. "Billy. Billy. Please." She choked out. She couldn't breathe. She could see red and yellow spots. She couldn't move her legs; they were pinned to the floor by Billy's weight. Her blood thumped like a drum in her ears.

Finally, her body reacted. She elbowed him in the ribs, his grip slackened and she sucked in a sweet lungful of air, coughing. She whipped her fist around to what she hoped was his chest. Her hand flared in pain as it connected to something hard and bony. That wasn't his chest.

His legs had moved off her now, and she grabbed his shoulder and flipped him under her, and pulled on the socket. She felt something break, and he let out a whimper of pain.

He wriggled out beneath her mumbling something. And she was lying on her back breathing deeply when the lights turned back on. She blinked away the flash of pain in her head, and sat up and looked for Billy. Vasquez was marking the papers in front of him, the class was all smiles and congratulations, none of them had seen what happened.

She looked towards the door, and saw the shadow of William Borden stumble through, slipping out of view, like a thundercloud rolling off into the distance.

Her thoughts were scattered like pieces of a broken mirror. Nothing made sense. Billy. Why had Billy?

What had just happened?

She tried to stop her hands from shaking.

* * *

 **American National Domestic Violence Hotline:**

1-800-799-SAFE (7233)

TTY 1-800-787-3224

 **Australian Domestic Violence Hotline:**

1800 737 732


	12. Chapter 12: Interlude

Chapter 12: Interlude

Billy ran. He ran out of the classroom, down the hallways, out the front gates of Gotham Academy. He was expecting someone to shout out to him, or for someone to grab hold of his arm the way his father had… no. No, stop. Don't think about that now. His right arm throbbed with pain he had never felt before, and he held it limply in his left hand like a dead snake. It didn't hurt as much as his memory of what he had done.

How had he…?

Artemis.

He hadn't meant to…

But it didn't matter if he meant to or not. He had.

His breath felt ragged, like his chest had pushed his heart all the way up and was now stuck like a piece of phlegm in the back of this throat. His nose was running. He wiped his arm across it and sniffed.

He crossed the park opposite the Academy. It was going cool, already. Wind blew leaves and refuse across the ground. The sun felt like a wet rag on his face. He kept moving as fast as he could, stumbling lopsided like a drunken zombie. He couldn't move his right arm, and with every step it jolted with a think heavy pain. He came to welcome it. He built the pain into his cycle: suck the air into his mouth, wheeze it out, take a few more steps, stumble, flash of pain. Again and again and again. He couldn't think of anything else. Didn't want to think of anything else. Just one foot in front of the other. Air in and out. Flashes of pain.

He was dimly aware of exiting the park and crossing a street. He didn't check for cars, they'd brake for him, probably.

Eventually he stumbled, and his knees bent down until he was crouching. He knew in his heart that he couldn't move one step further and realising this, he collapsed down onto the pavement and put his back against a dirty brick wall. A small flower was growing sideways out of the cracked bricks, and he thought it to be the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

"Something interesting on the wall, Richie?" Billy looked up. Three scruffy looking teenagers were standing in front of him. The one on the left wore cheap sunglasses and had a tattoo of something on his neck that travelled down, hidden by his white t-shirt. He appeared to be the one who had just spoken. Billy gathered his breath.

"Are you talking to me?" Billy said. His voice was so rough and grating he hardly recognised it as his own.

With Sunglasses were a girl and a boy. The other boy wore canvas pants and heavy steel-capped black boots. He had a sense of lazy arrogance about him. His arms were folding across his chest, and Billy could see a small bag hanging from his back. The girl had a pointed chin and a cute face that was framed by shoulder length styled hair. A purple birthmark that was a large blot stood out on the right side of her face. It looked as if someone had spilt some wine on her which never rubbed off. Billy actually quite liked it, it was a deep dark purple, nearly red.

"Yeah," Sunglasses said, apparently the speaker of the group. "I'm talking to you, Richie." Boots smirked. Purple frowned.

"My name's not Richie," Billy said.

Sunglasses shrugged, and the tattoo on his neck writhed. Billy thought that it was a snake with wings. It had slanted, evil looking green eyes. "Nickname then. You go to Gotham Academy. You're rich. Richie. Get it?" He laughed but there was no humour in it.

Billy looked at Sunglasses and saw himself reflected back off the black surfaces of his namesake. He felt laughter bubbling up inside him. He felt weird. Light, like when his mum used to push him on the swing down at the local park. She would ask him if she could push him higher and he always said no, but never meant it and she would push him higher and higher until his stomach felt like it had climbed up to his mouth and he was weightless and flying.

"Rich? Me rich?" He laughed so hard his breath wheezed whenever he inhaled, but he couldn't stop laughing. His arm burned with pain from the movement of his shoulders shaking, and his ribs flared like they had been branded. But he couldn't stop laughing. Tears welled up in his eyes from laughing so hard.

The idea of him being rich _was_ completely ludicrous. His father had been rich, yes. But all of his money was either hidden safely in offshore accounts or had been seized by the police. And his mother hadn't been allowed to work. How could she when she had to keep the house spotless and have his dinner ready for when Billy's father got home? The door was always opened with a proffered scotch held in a shaking hand and a kiss that left lipstick to his father's cheek like the rotten shell of wet leaves on pavement. She would wait to smile until after he said "good," or "thank you, darling."

Billy had stopped laughing. He wiped the tears from his eyes with difficulty, putting his right, hurt shoulder down slowly until his arm sat in his knee, and then wiped his eyes with his forefinger of his left hand like a fleshy windscreen wiper.

"I'm a charity case. Trust me. You're probably richer than me. Look." He raised his left arm and turned it to the left to show off the poorly patched hole in his blazer. "I get the hand-me-down hand-me-downs."

"You go to Gotham Academy. That's at least two hundred grand a year, probably more. There's no way you're poor," Purple said.

"Scholarship," Billy lied. No way could he say 'witness protection scheme.' That would kind of defy the point of the whole witness protection scheme in the first place. "I'm really good at drama," he added when he saw three sceptical faces staring at him.

"What do you think guys?" Sunglasses looked at the other two.

"I believe him," Boots said. He smiled and his face suddenly transformed from menacing to charming. Something shiny winked in his right ear.

"He's cute enough," Purple said which made Billy blush and her laugh, causing him to blush even more. Her teeth shone white in the sunlight.

"What's wrong with your arm?" Sunglasses said.

Billy cradled his arm in his left hand. "I think it's broken," he said. Boots walked over to him, and grabbed Billy's arm, sending a wave of pain shooting through his shoulder.

"Ouch."

Boots prodded along his arm with his fingers, eyes narrowed and intent.

Billy tried to push Boots away, but Boots brushed aside his arm like it was an annoying mosquito. "What are you–"

"Calm down. I'm a medical student." Billy looked up at him to see Boots' frown gone, replaced by a concerned look.

Medical student? He didn't look like a medical student.

"It's not broken," Boots said. "Hold this." He shrugged off the small sports sack he had been wearing on his back and held it out to Billy, who took it in his left hand, reluctantly resting his right arm on his knee again with a grimace.

"What's it for?" Billy asked.

"Open it."

Billy struggled to hold it still in the crook of his arm while he untightened the top. Boots had made his way to be standing over Billy's right shoulder. He moved Billy's shoulder back and forth a few times.

"Ow! What are you doing?"

"Your shoulder's dislocated," Boots said. "How'd that happen?"

Billy remembered Artemis squirming underneath him, neck gripped between his palms. He flinched, and shifted how he was sitting. "I deserved it," he said.

"Fair enough," Boots said.

Billy finally managed to get the bag open, reached inside it and felt something cool and hard. He drew it out. It was a bottle of whiskey. "What's this for?" He shook the bottle of whiskey in his hand, the amber liquid about three quarters full sloshing inside.

"For afterwards." Boots was concentrating , looking down at his shoulder, of his tongue poking out between his lips.

"After what?" Billy looked down to his right as Boots shifted, putting his left arm behind Billy's shoulder, right palm pressed to the front of it.

"This."

There was a wave of pain in Billy's shoulder and he cried out. There was a popping noise that he heard from far away. He saw green shapes in his vision, diamonds that grew larger and larger, circles that widened into ovals then turned into squares.

"Better?" Boots' face came into view like a Polaroid developing. Billy tried to move his shoulder, it was sore, but it seemed like a dull ache compared to before, like a wound healing rather than being inflicted.

"Yeah," Billy said. He laughed. Boots grabbed the bottle and took a long swig. He offered it to Billy who looked at it doubtfully.

"I don't drink," he said.

"You do now." Boots held it out. Purple had her arms folded and a smirk on her plump lips. He realised how dry his were. He licked his lips and grabbed the bottle from Boots.

"There you go!" Sunglasses called out.

Billy tipped the bottle up. Fire rushed down his throat and settled deep in his stomach like a burning ember. He coughed. Everyone laughed. He stood up and took another gulp. Sunglasses took off his glasses, revealing a freckled face and light blue eyes.

"I'm Warren," Sunglasses–Warren said. "This is Q," Boots waved. "And that's Artemis."

Billy started. "What did you say?"

"Alex," Warren said. "That's Alex." Alex's lips were pursed, like she was thinking. Her hair blew in front of her face, and she absently brushed it away.

"I'm Billy. Nice to meet you, and thanks for," he moved his right arm.

"No problem," Q said. "It was good to be able to practice on an actual person."

"You hadn't done that before?"

"Nope. But I have studied extensively. I'm a second year at Gotham University."

"I'm sorry about before," Warren said. "I thought everyone who went to Gotham Academy was a rich kid with a silver spoon stuck up their arse."

Billy laughed. "Well not me, that's for sure."

"Yeah, I realise that now," Warren laughed sheepishly.

Billy's phone buzzed. Capooche was calling him. He turned off his phone. Billy didn't want to talk to him right now.

"You guys want to get out of here?" Billy asked.

"Where?" Alex said.

Billy looked behind him at Gotham Academy bursting out of the sky in grey clumps. He must have run about ten or fifteen blocks. "Anywhere but here," he said.

Warren grinned, and put his hand on Billy's now fixed shoulder. "Yeah, I reckon we can do that."

* * *

Artemis touched her neck, studying the bruises in the mirror. They were spread across her neck like a Rorschach test, and had already started to turn the colour of plum.

She had spent the rest of the day in a daze, slumped back in her varying seats, staring out the window at the bright spot of sun, wandering from class to class like a zombie. She had taken her lunch in the corner of the cafeteria picking at her lunch tray until the bell rang and then shoving it all into the bin, nearly untouched. Everything had felt two dimensional. Like she was stuck inside a music video inside a pixelated screen and she was watching herself do everything. People had talked to her, but she brushed them off like they were insects.

She realised after she was home, that she was in shock. She was surprised, she could be attacked by her sister and feel normal, but Billy, and she froze up? It was because it was completely unexpected. She had never thought she would be in any danger at Gotham Academy, apart from failing or not making any friends. And to have her life threatened, by someone she had deemed completely non-threatening–friendly even… it shook her, she was forced to admit.

It took two hot cocoas and a shower before she was feeling normal again. And so there she was, staring into the fogged up mirror.

She looked into her own eyes like she was another person. "Hello, there." She said, and then laughed at how stupid she looked. Her cheeks were flushed from the heat of the shower, and her fingers tingled from the newfound warmth.

She pulled on underwear, a bra and turtleneck top, hiding the bruises. She heard the rattle of the key in the lock, a thump, a pause, then "Artemis!" Her mother called out.

"Just a sec."

"Artemis!" Her mother called out again, saying something else that Artemis couldn't hear.

"Be right there!" Artemis sighed and rested her forehead against the mirror. The glass was cold and damp from condensation. "Everything's fine," she said. She hung up her towel and gathered her school clothes off the tiles and put them in the washing basket.

"Artemis!"

"Be right there!" She hurried out of the bathroom, grabbing the wall to slingshot herself around the corner, stopping her from slipping. The TV was mumbling something about a death in Blackgate Penitentiary. There was a grainy aerial shot of the prison on the island, then of a redheaded reporter talking to the camera. "…found dead this morning in his cell. It is still unclear whether it was a suicide or a murder, forensics are on site determining cause of death. The victim's name has not been released although it has been confirmed by officials that it was an inmate. This marks the third death at Blackgate this month and an official enquiry int–" Artemis muted the television.

"Artemis!"

Artemis huffed and slid the chain off the door and opened it. "I told you I was coming!"

Dick Grayson stood in the doorway holding two bags of groceries. "Good," he grinned. "Because I'm famished." His hair was tousled and he was wearing long loose black pants and a green sweater. How many sweaters did he have? And what was he doing here? Her mother was next to him, apparently unconcerned and unsurprised by his company. Artemis stared at him until she realised she wasn't wearing any pants. She ducked behind the doorway.

"Why aren't you wearing any pants?" her mother asked.

"Because I didn't know _Dick_ was going to be here."

"Artemis had told me ten," Dick said. "But then I realised that she must have gotten the time wrong because who eats dinner at ten o'clock? So I decided to come earlier, as long as that's no hassle, Mrs Crock?"

Her mother smiled at Dick. She liked him, Artemis could already tell. "Of course not, Richard. Thanks for your help carrying the groceries by the way. I don't know how I would've managed without you."

"I'm sure you would've managed fine, Mrs. Crock. But I'm always more than happy to help."

Artemis caught Dick's eye and feigned vomiting. He winked. She threw her hands up and huffed. Leaving the front door open, she strode off to her room. The nerve of him! You couldn't just show up wherever you wanted to uninvited! She shimmied into jeans in the dark of her bedroom–the sun had started setting and she hadn't bothered turning the light on. Outside the sky had turned purple.

"We're making pasta."

Artemis walked into the kitchen to see her mother and Dick doing just that. Dick had started making the dough while her mother unpacked the groceries.

"Let me, mum." She juggled cereal boxes and a jar of jam.

"Thanks, Artemis." Her mother looked at the TV and the muted news. "Anything interesting happening in Gotham?"

"Newsflash: more dead people. Nothing new, Mum."

"Tell me about you two, how do you know each other? It's good that you've made new friends." Her mother moved off down the hall.

"He sits behind me in English," Artemis called out. She brushed roughly past Dick to put a jar of peanuts in the cupboards. He sidestepped deftly, and she stumbled.

"It's true. I have a stunning view of the back of Artemis's head," Dick called out to her mother.

"What are you doing?" she hissed moving to stand next to him.

"Making pasta," Dick said.

"Oh is that what you're doing, I thought you were just pouring flour across the bench randomly."

"It's not random, I'm making art." Dick studied the flour strewn across the bench and nodded, stroking his chin. "I'm calling it: Flour One. The critics are going to eat it up."

"It's good the critics are, because at the moment we won't be eating anything," Artemis said.

"Touché."

"Make a ring with the flour and crack the eggs into it."

"How many?"

"Three. Have you added salt?"

"No, but I've put in two chillies and half a cooked trout."

"You're joking right."

"You'll have to taste it to see."

"I think I'll let my mum try it first. If she drops dead I know not to eat any."

"But then you might die of starvation."

"I'll take my chances."

Dick cracked the eggs, while Artemis added a splash of olive oil and a tablespoon of salt to the forming dough.

"Knead away," Artemis said. She heard the whir of the washing machine start up, and her mum wheeled back into view.

"How's the pasta going?" she asked.

"Slowly," Artemis said.

"Well that's alright. How was your day at school?" Artemis thought of everything that had happened, learning about Bette's disappearance, Billy randomly attacking her. She shivered at that last thought and rubbed her arms.

"Eventful," Artemis said.

"Well you'll have to tell me all about it later," her mother said.

Artemis looked up and saw Dick looking at her, eyes dark blue and unreadable. "Yeah, yeah," she laughed softly without humour. "Sure."

* * *

"Why are you here?" Artemis asked. "And no jokes," she added when he took a breath to speak. "Just the truth, Dick." They were in her room. She could hear her mother singing softly in the kitchen while the pasta sauce sizzled on the stove. The sky had turned from purple to a dark blue. The moon was showing in the corner of her window. Dick didn't respond at first. She thought she could hear him breathing–but no that was just the wind.

"Look, Artemis. I just think we could both use a friend right now."

"I have enough friends," Artemis lied.

"You're lying. You can never have too many friends," Dick said. Her room was a bit of a mess. Okay, a bit more than a bit. Clothes, from when she had pulled them out of her draws searching for the pants she was currently wearing, were strewn across the floor. She felt self-conscious. She half-wanted to tidy them all up now, grab that bra hanging from her bedhead, pick up the tracksuit pants sitting lifelike on her desk chair, tuck that head of a poking-out sock back under her bed.

She didn't know what to say so they fell into silence again. The couple upstairs were arguing again. She could hear them shouting. Something broke. Artemis imagined the woman throwing all their plates one by one at her boyfriend. Later, they would eat all their dinner in bowls, maybe. Or drink soup from mugs, huddled up on the carpet that Artemis had seen that one time she had been inside the upstairs apartment to deliver a letter that had been placed in the wrong letterbox. It had been a bill. Maybe that was what they were arguing about, money. It made her feel sad.

"Let's have dinner, and then we'll break into the office," Dick said, "there has to be some clue in there. Something that leads to Bette."

"And what if there isn't? What if there's no clue. This isn't a movie, Dick. People get hurt. Sometimes people die." Artemis felt tears well up in her eyes. She brushed them away angrily and lay back on her bed, arms folded across her chest. The ceiling was grey in the light. There was a spider-web in the corner of the ceiling that Artemis made her mother leave alone. Spiders needed homes too.

Dick lay down on the bed next to her, but not too close. He looked up at the ceiling with her like it was the most interesting thing in the world. "People get hurt and die in movies too," Dick said. "The mother even dies in Tangled and that's the happiest film I can think of right now. Wait," he held up a finger, frowning in concentration. "Nope, still the happiest film I can think of."

"Dick…"

"What?"

"I'm being serious." They were still lying on their backs not looking at each other. Artemis liked it. It made her feel like she could say anything she wanted, that her words would balloon upwards out over the both of them and hang there no matter how inappropriate or unjustified or hysterical. It was like an in-person version of texting.

Dick sighed. "I know. But there's no use worrying. We'll do what we can for Bette and that will have to be enough."

"What if it's not?"

"Then we get help."

"From whom?"

"Capooche, the Justice League. I don't know." Artemis snorted but didn't reply. She knew she was being unfair, that she was taking it out on Dick. But he could take it, she thought. And everyone needed a break from being stoic, maybe not Batman, maybe, but she sure did. Her neck still hurt from Billy choking her. Her eyes felt rough and sandy. She might fall asleep before ten at this rate.

"Artemis, Richard, dinner's ready!" her mother called out. The bed wobbled back into shape when Dick stood up. Artemis groaned and sat up. She straightened her hair. Rubbed her eyes. When she opened them again Dick was already at the door.

"Dinner smells delicious," he said.

"No thanks to you."

"Hey, I kneaded."

"The only thing you _needed_ was help."

Artemis found herself laughing as she sat down to eat dinner. As much as she knew he wouldn't admit it, she swore she could see Dick smiling, too.


	13. Chapter 13: Breaking

Chapter 13: Breaking

"You've done this before, haven't you," Artemis said as Dick hoisted himself over the front gate of Gotham Academy.

"Jumped over gates? Sure, plenty of times." He reached a hand down to help her up, but she jumped off the brick pillar on the left, kicked off the edge of the gate, and landed lightly on the other side.

"No, broken into Gotham Academy."

Dick jumped down from the gate and brushed his sweater off. Artemis flipped her hood on.

"Relax," he said. "The guard's always sit in the one place behind the dorms and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes."

In the night-time Gotham Academy put 'Goth' into 'Gotham.' The tops of the main building stretched out high into the darkness, and the rest of the building looked dark and angular as it paid host to the shadows. The sky was dark, the stars treaded water, keeping their blinking heads above the blackness, and the moon was hidden behind gauzy clouds.

Good, Artemis thought. Darkness was never an enemy when you were breaking into somewhere at night.

Artemis and Dick loped across the wide open courtyard to behind a tree near the front entrance. Artemis had brought her utility belt, hidden under her hoodie. She had a small, powerful flashlight, a knife, ten feet of thin, strong rope, and a box of matches. She thought that would be all she needed, she hoped so anyway.

"Do we go through the front door?" Artemis asked.

"No," Dick said. "It's got an alarm."

"How'd you find that out?"

"Trial and error."

"Uh huh. Turn your phone to silent."

"What do you think I am?" Dick asked. "An amateur?"

"Yep," Artemis muttered under her breath.

Artemis hoped that her mother hadn't checked her room yet.

After dinner, Dick had left her apartment and waited under Artemis's window. Artemis then waited in bed until her mother came into her room with a toothbrush in her mouth to say goodnight, and then snuck out the window. Dick had been leant against the tree under her window, apparently comfortable in the cold weather.

"You took your time," he had said.

"You can't rush sneaky," Artemis said.

They had walked away, Artemis's hands shoved into her hoodie pockets, while Dick walked steadily, un-slouched. She had turned back to look at her apartment. The windows were dark, she couldn't see anything. The apartment above hers had the lights on, and Artemis could see flashes of colour as the occupants walked through their living space, unaware they were being watched.

"So how are we getting to the Academy?" Dick asked.

"We can take the subway," Artemis said. "It doesn't take much more than an hour."

"Let's walk to a busy street where we can find a cab."

It was dangerous to walk the streets of Gotham at night, especially near Artemis's suburb where the police were approximately nine minutes away, and the ambulances nearly fifteen, but Dick didn't seem that worried or alert. He had his hands in his pockets and didn't look anywhere but in-front where he was walking. Artemis payed attention to the surrounds, she didn't want to be snuck up on.

"Watch out," Dick said, and manoeuvred Artemis around a patch of refuse on the path.

"Thanks," she had said. The moon had disappeared behind clouds. She could hear the horns and traffic from a nearby road. They'd be able to find a cab soon.

The cab ride had been awkward. Dick and Artemis sat in the back silently while the cab driver flicked through stations of loud static and loud bad music. The cab driver kept glancing at them in the back in the rear-view mirror, as if to remind himself they were still there.

"Late night to go to–" The cab driver was cut off by his own coughing that shook his chubby jowls like a wobbling jelly. The coughing turned hacking and throaty and the driver's whole face seemed to turn another colour, as he took out a crumpled used tissue from the small compartment next to the gear stick. It reminded Artemis of Detective Capooche, she wondered how his health was, and if he'd discovered that his notebook was missing yet. "Late night to go to a park," the cab driver finally choked out.

Artemis slouched back in her seat and put her feet up on the passenger's chair in front of her.

"What can we say, we enjoy an adventure," Dick said.

The cabbie went to reply, but whatever he said was lost in another fit of coughing. Artemis wound down her window and tried to breathe the cool air from outside. She watched the steam and smoke from the tops of buildings spin and flare like the skirt of an invisible dancing girl. The cab driver coughed once more, and rested his fat hand on the gearstick.

They had gotten out of the cab at the park across from the school. Dick had peeled notes out of his wallet to pay the driver who looked surprised that they had been able to pay the hefty fare. Artemis had stretched her legs, grateful to be free of the musty cramped seat of the taxi. Without indicating, the cab pulled out into the flow of the night.

"So," Dick had said.

"So, what?"

Dick shrugged. "So now it starts," he had said.

Her mother hadn't noticed her gone yet, she hadn't tried to call or text her. Artemis hoped that the silence would last. The last thing she wanted to do was to worry her mother by sneaking out at night.

A flashlight cut through the trees on the right.

"What were you saying before about the guards?" Artemis hissed. She grabbed Dick, pushing him down behind a shrub, and crouched next to him.

Boots crunched on gravel, and the light beam swung around. Artemis pushed herself lower, slowed her breathing and looked down. She knew that it would be her face and eyes that would reflect off the light and give her away. Dick was a warm presence pressed against her right side. She could feel his heartbeat, slow and steady. Her heartbeat seemed to shake her whole body.

There was something different about doing this sans superhero suit. If they were caught, Artemis didn't have the League to back her up and keep her out of trouble with the law. Artemis was widely aware that trespassing and breaking and entering were distinctly illegal. If they were caught, in the least her mother would be called in, and a stint in juvie might be preferable to her mother's involvement.

A radio crackled from closer than Artemis had expected. "Anyone out there? Over."

"No. I thought I heard voices though, over," the guard's voice, speaking back into the radio.

"Okay. Stay on alert. Over."

A twig snapped nearby, and then the torch swung away and Artemis let her breath out. "So much for lazy guards," she whispered to Dick.

"Strange," he said.

"We haven't scoped it out well enough," Artemis said. "Maybe we should wait another day or two until we can prepare better."

"Bette might not have that long."

Artemis chewed the side of her mouth and pursed her lips. She didn't like it. On a mission, half the work was good preparation and planning. Of course, usually those plans fell apart, but it was the preparation, knowing the exit points to buildings in an emergency, the foe they were up against that kept the team alive. But Dick was right. Bette might not have time for the proper preparations. It was a dilemma.

"Fine," Artemis whispered. "How do we get in?"

Artemis couldn't see it, but somehow she knew Dick was grinning. "Now that's the fun part."

* * *

Billy laughed as he was pushed higher on the swing. The whiskey was a pleasant warmth in the pit of his stomach, burning softly like the embers of a fire. Q stopped pushing him, and Billy slowed down, his feet skidding on the tanbark until he was stationary.

"Pass it here," he said. He rocked back and forth on the swing, using his legs to push himself forward and back.

Alex hiccoughed, and passed him the bottle of whiskey. Billy shook it, listening to the liquid slosh inside. "It's nearly all gone," he said and took another drink.

"I wonder why," Warren said. He was sitting on the other swing, arms crossed against the cold. It was funny Billy thought, he didn't feel cold at all.

They were in a small run-down park nestled between a pie shop and an apartment block. The swing chains were rusted. At the bottom of the slide that maybe used to be green but now looked a sickening tan-yellow colour, there was a muddy puddle–a welcome treat for any child who slid down it.

It was getting dark. Billy could barely make out the bony tops of the trees from the sky. The park was clothed in a murk-dark coat, save for one light pole that flickered intermittently, casting a weak pool of light around it.

Alex sat on the ground in front of him shredding leaves.

"So how is Gotham Academy?" Q asked. He was leant against the frame for the swings, idly scrolling through his phone, jaw and neck lit up from the screen.

"It's okay I s'pose," Billy said. "The kids aren't as stuck up as you'd think them to be, most of them anyway."

"Have many friends?" Alex asked. She paused leaf shredding, looked up at him, hair falling down in front of her eyes.

"Uh, yeah. A few I guess."

"Only a few?" She stretched out a hand, leaning her whole body to the right to grab more leaves–she had shredded all the leaves in her immediate radius like a logging company.

"Three," Billy said. He thought of Artemis. "Maybe two now," he said.

"Why?"

In the dark, Billy could barely make out Alex's birthmark. He thought of what had happened with Artemis–what he had done to Artemis. There was something lodged in his throat. He looked down, and scuffed his feet back and forth on the tanbark. "One of my friends… is missing," he said, thinking suddenly of Bette. He hadn't thought about Bette for so long. He felt bad about it. Like he was meant to be on watch or something. That if he looked away for too long, he'd miss something important.

There was a silence to the park. Billy felt like he had to fill it up. That's what everyone spends their whole lives doing, Billy thought, trying to fill up that sort of silence.

"She ran away or was kidnapped or something. No one knows what happened. It's the first twenty-four hours that's the most important part of the investigation right?" Billy found himself glancing at his watch even though he couldn't make out the hands in the dark. "Yeah well we've past that now. And nothing. There's nothing. It's like she's just disappeared, but without the puff of smoke or anything."

Billy sat still on the swing. He had been shouting, he realised. He wiped spittle off his chin. The bottle of whiskey hung limply in his other hand. He looked at it, lifted it up to his mouth, but then looked away and put it back down.

"My sister disappeared," Alex said quietly. "Four years ago. The nineteenth of March. No note, nothing."

"Did they find her?" Billy asked.

"Yeah," Alex said, "they found her."

Billy waited for her to say more, but she didn't. She had stopped shredding the leaves, and her hands rested gently on her lap like they belonged to someone else. She stood up and walked over to him. She grew so close that Billy could make out tears on her cheek. She had been wearing mascara and it was smudged. She walked so close Billy thought she was going to kiss him. But at the last second she bent down and picked up the bottle of whiskey. She lifted it as if saluting the sky, and tipped it back.

After she had drunk from it, she held the empty bottle loosely in her hand and then tossed it over her shoulder.

The glass shattered on the pavement.

* * *

"So much for the fun part," Artemis muttered to herself, looking down at Dick crouched lithely at the bottom of the wall. Artemis wasn't too worried about the height; after all, she jumped across rooftops on a nightly basis. But the familiar rush of adrenaline was pervasive in her body. Her fingers tingled, and her heart was fast.

She slowed down her breathing. She was below the first row of classroom windows, and she only needed to reach the second row. Apparently all the windows of the main building were alarmed, which Artemis thought was a bit of overkill–who actually _wanted_ to break into a school? When she had asked Dick, he had shrugged, "there are a lot of very rich people's kids here, why wouldn't they go all out on security?"

Luckily for them, like all schools, Gotham Academy had to be maintained, and a window on the second floor had been broken a few days ago, and while the window had been replaced, the security system hadn't yet.

She shifted left on the wall, pressing her body as close to it as she could–she didn't want any guards to look up and see her scaling up the side of Gotham Academy.

"You're going well," Dick's voice drifted up to her. "Just a bit higher."

"Shut up," she hissed back.

Her legs ached a bit, and she carefully held onto the wall with her two hands and shook out one leg at a time. The last thing she needed was to rush and get a cramp in her calves. At the same time the longer she took, the more strain it would be on her body. She looked up at the row of windows she could see above her –the way in, and then looked down behind her at the small trees that swayed gently in the wind. It was, she thought, a matter of balance.

When Dick had told her about the window, she had thought immediately how easy it was. But then she had realised she wouldn't be able to just shoot a grappling arrow and pull herself up, and she couldn't show off her full athletic abilities to Dick. She had volunteered to do it–she couldn't let a normal boy do it, he might fall and alert the guards… or break something. Besides, she had the rope to pull him most of the way up.

The only trouble was getting there first.

But some things weren't all that troubling when you looked closer at them. The façade of Gotham Academy had plenty of small nooks and crannies that made perfect hand and footholds.

Artemis let herself fall into a steady rhythm and was soon making a fast pace up the building. Still, she took the time to double check each hand and foothold before she put her full weight onto it. It would be easy for her to find a loose piece of stone and herself flat on her back at the bottom of the building with Dick laughing at her.

She reached the window without trouble. She braced herself–right hand wedged into a crack in the mortar, and reached out with her left hand to unlatch the window. It wouldn't open. She tugged harder on the window and felt it give slightly. Her right shoulder started to ache. She reached out with her left foot, searching for a foothold closer to the window, but her foot just scraped off the wall.

Artemis put her foot back, and reached carefully down into her utility belt and found her torch, her cold fingers fumbling a second on the leather. She pushed the torch as far back into her left hand as she could while still holding it and turned it on, hoping that her jumper sleeve would hide the excess light.

The window leapt out at her in the bright LED torchlight. Artemis examined the frame. The window frame had been sealed shut from a new haphazard coat of paint that smelled of something probably toxic. She would have to open it somehow. Artemis went to turn the torch back off but her cold fingers fumbled and she watched in horror as the torch spun end over end like a falling matchstick, landing on the gravel pathway in a pool of its light.

Artemis held her breath, looking behind her at the torch lighting up the courtyard. If a guard walked past there was no way they would miss it. Artemis turned back to the window and tried to focus on the task at hand. The only thing she could do now was hurry up and get the window open.

She took out her small knife from her utility belt carefully. If she dropped it there'd be no way to open the window and she'd have to climb down, pick it up, and climb back up again. She ran the knife around the frame as well as she could, and then stuck her knife into the side and pulled. There was a cracking sound as she levered the frame open. The window popped out and Artemis winced as it fell inside, there was a clatter but there was no sound of breaking glass. Artemis swung herself up into the window and breathed a sigh of relief. Inside, the room was pitch black and Artemis could barely make out the shadows of desks and chairs. There was a tall shelf below the window, and Artemis reached out. As she thought, the jacked window had fallen onto it instead of the floor. Lucky.

Classrooms in the dark were just one of those creepy things–like abandoned factories and old dolls. One of the shutters on one of the windows was loose and it clacked and rattled in the periodic gusts of wind that attacked the building.

She leaned back out the window, looking down. The torch and its light were gone, and the courtyard was dark. There was no sign of Dick. Artemis put her hands into her hoodie pocket and scanned the grounds again.

She took out her phone, but there were no new messages. Her home screen–of her and the Team at the beach made her pause. They should all be here now. She reminded herself that Dick was not like them, could not replace them, that he wasn't as fast as Wally, or as strong as Conner–but then again, neither was she.

She sent Dick a text. _Where are you?_

Should she wait for him? Climb back down and look around for him? Or should she continue on, make her own way into the office and do her own snooping?

It was a tough decision. Artemis checked the time. 10:45. They had agreed to meet out at the park at 11:30 if they were separated. 45 minutes seemed like a lot of time, but it wasn't, especially when they needed answers about Bette. She decided to go on ahead without him. She considered for a moment leaving the rope hanging out the window so he could join her, but decided that it was too risky with so many guards crawling over the grounds–any of them could chance upon it and know that someone was inside.

She sent Dick a text instead. _Going on ahead to office. Window still open if you can climb._

Artemis turned on her phone light and walked through the desks to the door. The door was locked. Artemis cursed. She ruffled through the teacher's desk drawers until she found what she was looking for–a paper clip. She twisted it apart to fashion a makeshift lock pick and set to work. She couldn't see what she was doing, she had to use two hands to work the lock pick and couldn't hold the phone at the same time, so she just kind of rummaged around with the lock pick and hoped for the best. Eventually, she heard a click. She tried the door handle and it opened. Artemis breathed a sigh of relief, thanked Robin for the hour of practice he made the whole Team do, grabbed up her phone, and stepped out into the corridor.

* * *

Billy stumbled across the pavement. The alcohol had caught up to him. His head spun, the trees they passed were wet blurs, and the sky was cracked like pavement.

He had thrown up twice, once on the ground under the swing, and once on the road mid-crossing. Warren gripped his arm and offered encouraging words to Billy as they helped him walk back to his dorm room in Gotham Academy.

"There you go, buddy. Just a few more steps like those ones. You're doing well."

"Should've known the boy couldn't handle his drink," another voice said. .

"What do you expect, Q? He's barely sixteen. We shouldn't have given him any." Alex's face flashed in front of him. Her birthmark looked like a wine dark sea.

He smiled widely at her. It felt weird and he put his hand up to his face, it felt cold and he pulled it back and forth like dough.

"Stop that," Alex said gently. "You'll hurt yourself."

"How much further?" Billy asked. He kept blinking up at the little lights in the sky watching them disappear and then reappear like magic.

"Not far now." Someone tugged his arm and he stumbled along compliantly.

He wondered what time it was. He put his hand forward into his pocket and pulled out his phone. His limbs felt like the framework of an umbrella. He clicked the phone screen on and then off and then on again. Someone had tried to call him eight times. Who was it?

"Ca-Poo-Cheee" Billy sounded out.

Alex looked forward at his screen. "Who's Capooche?" she asked.

"A cop," Billy said.

"Why is a cop calling you?" she asked.

"'Cause of my dad," he said. "He's a crooook." He stretched out the word until it broke on the tip of his tongue. "Crook, crook, crook." He repeated.

He swiped Capooche's name until the phone unlocked.

"What are you doing?" Alex asked.

There was a pause while they all kept walking forward. The night air was cool in Billy's throat. "You're calling him?" Alex asked. "Is that really the best idea?" She went to grab the phone but Billy swung around and held it out of reach. He accidentally pressed the speaker button, and the phone's ringing came out of the speakers, soft and tinny in the night time.

"Hi Billy," Capooche said softly. "I'm glad you called me back. There's no good way to put this, son, so I'm going to give it to you straight. Your father died in Ravensclaw this morning, I'm going to need you to come identify him with me tomorrow. It was another inmate. We don't know who yet, but we're working on it. Hello? Billy? Hello?

Billy stared at the phone in his hand. He didn't know how to feel. His father was dead? Before sentencing? He hadn't even been made to pay for his crimes yet.

"Holy..." Warren breathed nearby.

They had stopped on the path.

"Thanks," he croaked into the phone. "Thanks for letting me know."

"That's alright, Billy," Capooche said. "I'm sorry."

Billy nodded until he realised Capooche wasn't there to see it, but he just kept nodding. He didn't know what else to say. Anything he went to say just slid back down his throat like a glass pipe.

Someone grabbed at him, and he let himself be pulled into an embrace. It was Alex. Her hair smelled like strawberries.

Capooche had stopped talking. Billy let the phone drop limply from his hand. He heard the screen break on the ground. His glasses had pushed up uncomfortably against his cheek from pressing into Alex's shoulder but he held her closer. He rocked back and forth and pushed his face into Alex's warm neck.

They stayed like this for a while, Billy crying while Alex held him tightly, as if worried the moon would reach down from the sky and steal him away.

* * *

A/N: We're well over the halfway mark now, friends! just a short sharp dash to the finish line left. I'm going to claim tentatively that updates _should_ be more regular now that I have a month or two of uni break, but I'll be splitting updates between this story, and my other story " _This is the Now._ " If any of you have watched The 100, feel free to check it out! Review or message me for queries; and constructive feedback (sentence structure, syntax, word choice, dialogue, confusing scenes, rather than grammatical errors) is always appreciated.

Peace & poetry `~WCW


	14. Chapter 14: Ghosts

Chapter 14: Ghosts

Artemis crept through the darkened corridors of Gotham Academy. Her phone torch spilled across lockers and locked doors. She kept glancing down at her phone screen, hoping for a text from Dick. Where was he? She was worried about him, she admitted.

Gotham Academy was a maze warren. Artemis reached the top of a staircase. There were two different corridors stretching out on her level. But what level was she on? She'd come through the window on the second floor, but she had a feeling that she was more lost than she thought. When she and Bette went to the office they had climbed two flights of stairs and stayed on the first floor. That had only happened two days ago.

It felt like so much longer.

There was a tiny metal etched map stuck to the wall next to the staircase. There were so many names that Artemis could barely make anything out on the map. She was reminded of her nightmare–the small door out in the courtyard and the shadow that suffocated her, and shivered. She looked at the map. She thought she was there, on the left side at the bottom of that staircase. The office was in the middle, to her right. But there was no corridor to her right. She huffed in frustration.

She took the stairs down.

She looked at the shadows of the lockers enlarged up to the ceiling from her phone. She had always felt at home in the night time, but right now she would give nearly anything to see sunlight peeking through the row of windows and sliding off the shiny tops of lockers.

Schools were a strange place at night.

Artemis found more classroom doors, their numbers bold and blocky. She didn't recognise any of the numbers from her classes, but they all began with the number two.

Artemis let herself imagine for a second that Bette was locked behind one of these classroom doors. She shone her torch onto the door she was walking past and the glass window reflected the light and her chin and lips. She imagined that Bette was struggling tied up, that she could see the light and Artemis through the corner of the window, and tried to shout out around the rag muffling her.

Artemis shuddered and continued on her way. She just needed to find the office and search it. One step at a time.

She padded forward until she reached another staircase. She shrugged and went down it, trailing her fingers on the cold stonework of the wall. She felt like she was a ghost. She wondered if ghosts existed. Magic existed so logically ghosts probably did too, right? She thought that if they did exist there'd be many ghosts for each person; everyone killed off parts of themselves to be different people than who they used to be.

Finally Artemis thought she knew where she was. This was one of the staircases she climbed with Bette, wasn't it?

Tree shadows groaned and shook, their leaves pinging against the sides of the windows. The office was in the corridor ahead and to the left, she recognised a few of the posters stuck to the walls, this was it!

Artemis turned the corner to see the office lit up, and two figures standing in the doorway. She ducked back behind the corner, turned her phone torch off, and pressed herself into the wall. Her heart was racing. Something metal was pushing uncomfortably into her back, but she ignored it. That had been so careless of her! When no one shouted or came her way, she took a deep breath and relaxed. She was okay. They hadn't seen her.

They were talking and Artemis stood still and tried to listen.

"Can't we move it forward?" A hushed woman's voice, breathy with nerves.

"No. We will stick with the deadline. I will not be seen as unreliable, or to be spooked by one annoying cop's snooping. We will move forward the night after tomorrow." The second voice sent chills down Artemis's spine. It had a refined accent, and the words were spat out with quiet menace. The cop's snooping. Was he talking about Capooche?

"I… Okay."

"I know you want to ask me. It is natural to be concerned about one's progeny; it is, after all, they who shall inherit the earth."

"H-how is she?"

"Safe. Improving. And she will be as long as your co-operation continues," the man crooned. "Come on," a soft laugh, "you know that above all I am a man of my word."

Artemis itched to just poke her head out from around the corner to get a look. The man, especially, sounded important to whatever was going on. What deadline was going on? What operation was being conducted out of Gotham Academy's office?

They were speaking again, but too softly for Artemis to make out. She looked at her phone, an idea forming. They would see her if she stuck her head out to get a closer look, but surely they wouldn't see just a phone.

Artemis opened the camera app on her phone, and inched the camera out around the corner.

The figures were a bit blurry, but on her screen she could make out the turned back of a man in a suit, and beyond him, half a neck which belonged to the female speaker, the edges were black and grainy from the shadows, but the rest was lit up from the light within the office. Artemis frowned in frustration. She pinched the screen, trying to zoom in on the woman, see some sort of detail that would lead to a clue, an identity, anything that could lead to Bette.

The neck grew on the screen, pale and grainy. Too large. Artemis fiddled a bit with the zoom. Finally happy with it, Artemis drew her hand back, accidentally pressing the camera button on her phone. She watched in horror, powerless as the phone's light went off, illuminating the hallway, and then a larger flash as a photo was taken. Artemis froze.

"What was that?" the woman said.

"It appears someone has been eavesdropping," the man said. "Come on out," the woman gasped at something. "We won't hurt you." Artemis heard the distinctive sound of a gun being cocked that echoed loudly through the whole corridor.

She bolted, running back the way she had come.

The report of the gun being fired three times, deafening in the cramped corridor. Artemis flinched at each gunshot, imagining the bullets ricocheting off the walls and lockers like a deadly game of Ping-Pong. But through blind luck or poor aim, she wasn't hit at all.

Her whole body was shaking from the sudden injection of adrenaline. Her shoes squeaked on the floor. Her teeth were gritted from the expectancy of another gunshot and a sudden pain in her back.

As she reached the end of the corridor before the stairwell she had come down before, she couldn't resist a glance over her shoulder to check for a pursuer. The man was standing at the other end of the corridor. He wasn't holding his gun. She could just make him out, a shadow deeper than the rest.

He turned around and walked away from her as slowly and as casually as if he were strolling down a supermarket aisle.

His voice echoed back as smooth as velvet. "Run as fast as you want to, you won't get away."

Artemis shivered, and ran up the stairs taking them two at a time; the only sound her rasping breath and the pad of her shoes against the worn stone.

* * *

Everyone was silent when they reached Gotham Academy. They had been silent for some time. The alcohol was slowly wearing off, and Billy had a headache that pulsed with every step. His tongue felt like sandpaper. Worst of all was the knowledge of his father's death roiling around and around his head like a constricting python.

"Well I guess this is it then," he said, standing in front of the wrought iron gates, a chain wrapped and padlocked around it. His voice sounded raspy and he could barely recognise it. It was like everything he said belonged to someone else.

"How are you going to get in?" Alex asked.

Billy looked up at the gates, tall and looking impossibly high. "Uh… with a little help?"

Q and Warren moved over to the gate. Interlacing their fingers, Billy tentatively stepped into it.

"One… two… three!"

Billy pushed himself upwards. For a brief moment he thought he would go shooting upwards into the dark until he vanished, but he only just latched onto the top of the gate with his hands. The metal was cold and gritty from rust. He scrabbled at the gate trying to push himself over. Two pairs of hands pushed his legs up. His pants were sagging down, and Billy reached one hand down to pull them back up. He managed to get his right elbow up over the gate, and he hung like this for a second, until Warren and Q heaved underneath him (Billy felt one of them push against his bottom and felt a surge of embarrassment) and then he was up and over the gate and falling.

The night slid around him as he fell. Air rushed through his ears like he were in a wind tunnel, and everything seemed to slow down, until he felt like he could reach out and pluck a strand from the air. He hit the ground and groaned.

"Shit, are you okay?" Q asked.

"Yeah," Billy rasped. "I'm okay." He pushed himself up and inspected himself for damage. There were tears in his blazer elbows as well as his knees. "Thanks for, you know, helping me out." Billy brushed himself off.

"That's alright," Warren said. "Anytime. It was nice to meet you, Billy."

"I'm sorry about your father," Alex said. Her face was half hidden from the gate bars, she looked like some organic barcode.

"Don't be," Billy said. "He deserved worse than what he got." Billy shivered from a heavy gust of wind. "It's getting cold," he said.

No one replied, and he shuffled back and forth uncomfortably.

"Goodbye, Billy," Alex said.

He nodded back. "Goodbye," he croaked out. He cleared his throat. "See ya," he said as nonchalantly as possible.

The three teenagers walked off. Billy kept expecting them to turn back and wave one last time, but they didn't. Slowly they grew indistinguishable from the darkness, and then all at once, Billy was alone.

He sighed, and trudged toward his dorm. He was about to be in severe trouble. He patted his pocket. At least he still had his dorm room key, and the card to swipe himself into the dorm building. It was dark and he stumbled a couple of times on the uneven path.

He heard gunshots. The sound was unmistakeable. There were three. He paused, frozen, but the ensuing silence stretched out. Why were there gunshots at Gotham Academy? Billy shivered and pulled his arms closer around himself. He looked around, but the night time was cold and showed nothing. The darkness reminded him of the lakes he had read about online that were a mile deep beneath their flat exterior. Something was going on, and the worst part was that he had no idea what it was.

He called Capooche, but the rings ran out, a brief crackling silence and then: "This is Martin Capooche, leave a message and I'll try to get back to you." Billy groaned and shut his eyes and then opened them again. It was just as dark as before.

He called 911. His hands were shaking by the second ring.

"911, what's your emergency?" The operator was a woman. She spoke too calmly, Billy didn't like it.

"I've heard gunshots at Gotham Academy."

"Are you in danger?"

Billy looked around him. "No, uh I don't think so. I'm outside."

"Has anyone been hurt or wounded that you know of?"

"I don't know."

"What's your name?"

"Why does that matter?"

"Sir, what's your name?"

"Just get here," he said, and hung up.

* * *

The grounds crawled with guards. Artemis peeked out the grounds-facing window of the classroom she had just picked the lock of. A guard walked across, and glanced up at the window she was looking out of. Artemis whiplashed back behind the wall.

She was surrounded by hostile people while she was trapped in a school at night. She could imagine the guards scouring through the school like water flooding a maze.

She nearly laughed from the absurdity of it all. She had sent Dick a text warning him about the man with the gun, not mentioning her stupid mistake that had led to it all happening.

Stupid mistakes were stupid, inherently. But they could get you killed. Artemis cringed, once again remembering what had happened in full. Batman and the Team would never let her hear the end of it if they knew.

Three things were clear to her right now. One: the guards were working for the man who had shot at her. Two: she had to either escape the school soon, or find somewhere to hide where the guards wouldn't find her or she was screwed. Three: the man had something to do with Bette's disappearance. It was too much of a coincidence for him not to. And whatever secrets the man was hiding, he was willing to kill a curious schoolchild to keep it a secret.

The funny thing about secrets, Artemis thought, is the way they have of getting out. Which just made her think about the lies she was telling the Team. She resolved that if she got out of this alive, she would come clean about her family. There was nothing to be ashamed of–it wasn't like she could choose her father and her sister, or decide what they did with their lives.

Artemis checked her phone. It was eleven o'clock, with still no text from Dick. She only had thirty minutes to escape, and meet up with Dick at the rendezvous time in the park. Being on time was looking more and more unlikely… getting there was looking less and less likely.

She checked the hallway by looking out the classroom window. All clear. The door creaked when she opened it like an oak tree in the wind. She didn't know if the guards had access to the school security system, so she decided the best way out undetected was the way she had come in –through the window on the second floor.

She reached the hallway the classroom was on without difficulty, retracing her previous steps like a ghost. She was cautious now, and didn't walk with her phone torch on–anyone ahead could see the light and come rushing, like the bugs to the bright fluorescent lights outside her apartment.

She stepped out to the classroom and saw the guards. They were down the left end of the corridor, facing away from her. She checked their hips. No visible guns. But that didn't mean they didn't have them.

She pulled her hood further down and padded across to the classroom. She opened the door as slowly as possible, wincing at the slight sound, glancing at the unmoving guards. They hadn't seen her. She slipped inside and pushed the door shut, being careful not to let the latch click. She breathed a sigh of relief.

"Hi."

She spun around. Dick was sitting on the teacher's desk, legs swinging back and forth like a child's, face illuminated by a slice of moon. She walked over to him. "What, not going to say hi? I–" he was cut off by Artemis punching him in the shoulder. "Ow." He rubbed his shoulder tenderly.

"Where have you been?" Artemis exclaimed. She had been out there being shot at, worried about him, while he had been lounging here, too busy to let her know he was okay! It felt like hot coals infused her whole body, and steam was hissing from her joints.

"Quiet down," Dick said, glancing at the door. "Someone will hear you."

"I don't care," Artemis said, but her voice was lowered as she glanced at the flimsy wooden door leading out to the corridor and the two guards. "You couldn't have texted me?"

"I did," he said, swinging down off the desk to stand next to her. She was taller than him, she realised smugly.

She checked her phone. Dick had sent her a text less than a minute ago. _Behind you_.

"Are you serious?"

He tossed something to her and she caught it reflexively. She turned it over in her hands. It was her flashlight she had dropped on her climb to the window. "I was busy retrieving this, and I had to come back the long way round to miss the guards. That's when I heard the gunshots, and checked my phone."

"And you didn't think to reply earlier?"

"I didn't want to distract you," he said.

"Hmm. Speaking of guards, there's some in the hallway." Artemis nodded her head toward the door.

"There's also more than a few below," Dick said. Artemis looked at the window. Dick had put it back in, she noticed.

"Well how do we get out then?" Artemis asked.

Dick shrugged and sat back onto the desk. "For now, we don't."

Outside it had begun to rain. Artemis sighed and hopped up onto the desk next to Dick. This might take a while.

* * *

Billy still couldn't hear sirens. What had happened to the police? Were they even coming? He had been hesitant to walk _toward_ the gunfire, so he was hiding behind a tree. He felt rain lightly on his face. He looked up, and that's when it started pouring down in sheets. The tree offered little shelter. He was already sopped; he felt water trickle down the back of his neck like icy fingers. He started shivering uncontrollably.

Billy could see the top of his dormitory over the grey shoulder of the main building. He thought longingly about the hot showers, and crisp sheets that awaited him.

He thought about the gunshots. Maybe they weren't really gunshots. They could have been fireworks set off by some unruly teens. Who was he kidding, they had been unmistakeably gunshots.

He let himself imagine someone, Mr Vasquez maybe, working late at night in his office, glasses set down on his desk, the weak light of a lamp straining down onto the book he had told the class he was writing. Mr Vasquez hearing a noise, had stood up, knocking over the lamp and shattering it on the floor.

"Who's there?" Mr Vasquez said.

No one answered. And he walked out of his office into one of the corridors, floor slippery with light from the moon spilling in through the windows. A tall shadowy figure stepping out. Bang! Bang! Bang!

Billy laughed quietly at his own stupidity. The rain hadn't stopped and now even his jumper under his blazer was sodden and heavy. His legs and arms felt cold and clammy. He felt utterly miserable. His mouth tasted foul, and he hawked up some phlegm and spat it on the ground, his saliva stringing back to his mouth like a spider's web. He brought his finger up and wiped it away.

He looked back, out through the gates of Gotham Academy, hoping to see the blue and white shadow of a police car. Or to hear its whooping siren jump and dip and swerve from a mile away as the car trawled through the sheets of rain. But there was nothing. He could only hear the gentle chirp of crickets, and the drum of rain as it scythed through the tree leaves above him, and the loud tin sound as it threw itself onto the roof of Gotham Academy.

He was getting colder. Billy pushed his hands under his armpits and jigged from side to side. The ground under him was sodden and muddy, and his shoes squelched every time he stepped.

He looked over at the dormitory. Smoke rose up in rings from the chimney and Billy shivered once more. It was dark enough and the rain too heavy that whoever had fired the gun wouldn't see him if he walked over to the dorm. Right? His feet had already begun to move, and ignoring any lingering trepidation, Billy allowed himself to follow.

He jogged through the rain. He fell over once after stumbling. He picked himself back up from the grass without any damage, and continued on. He had to go around the side of the main building to get to the front dorm entrance. He checked his pockets once more for his keys and card. They weren't there. He paused. He checked his other pocket, but only his phone was there. He ground his teeth and put his head between his hands in frustration. They must have fallen out of his pocket when he had fallen over. He took a few deep breaths. It was okay–he could go back and search for them.

He retraced his steps to where he thought he had fallen, got out his phone, glancing at its broken screen, before using it as a light to search. The ground was muddy, and his back started aching from bending over to look closely at the ground. He sat down in the mud and thought for a second. There was probably someone at the dorm reception he could get to open the door. Or he could call someone in the dorm to wake them up and come down to get him. That would have to be okay.

He walked around to the dorm, and saw a security guard standing under the lit up outside. Thank god.

"Hi," Billy said and the security guard started. "Thank god I found you, I lost my keys and I wasn't sure…" Billy trailed off as he saw the guard reach down to his hip.

The guard brought up his walkie talkie. "I've found the target," he said.

"What?" Billy said uncomprehendingly. He stepped forward to the guard and then convulsed as something hit him in his chest. He heard a loud clicking sound and Billy bit his tongue as his muscles spasmed out of control and he felt waves of pain pushing through him. He saw the grizzled face of the guard as he fell backwards. There was a dull pain in the back of his head, then nothing.

* * *

Dick wouldn't stop clicking the pen.

"Would you shut it," Artemis hissed. "The guards might hear you."

"Okay," Dick said. There were a few moments of silence but for the rain pouring down in grey-metal sheets, then the clicking started again.

Artemis reached across and yanked the pen out of Dick's hand, throwing it clattering into the dark corner of the classroom. Dick reached into the container on the teacher's desk, and looking Artemis in the eyes, drew out another pen.

Artemis threw up her hands, and stalked off to look out the window.

"Dick," she said. "The guards are walking off."

Dick was by her side in an instant, looking down with her out the window. The guards, who had stood in the rain for the better part of fifteen minutes, were now walking away. "What's going on?" she said.

Dick frowned, tapping his fingers in a pattern on the windowsill. "I don't know," he said.

They heard the crackle of a radio outside the door, and they ducked lower at the windowsill. Artemis could see the shadows of the guards through the plate of glass set into the door. Artemis wished she had had the thought to relock the classroom door, she would feel a lot safer behind a door that a pair of curious guards couldn't open if they tried.

"Well I'm glad they caught the little bastard," one of the guards said.

"True. But I like to think what the boss is going to do to him," the other guard's voice drifted back to them, surprisingly feminine and high, like a pre-pubescent boy. "He gives me the bloody creeps."

"I'd watch what you say about him."

"Well he's not here now, is he?"

The bickering guards walked off, and Artemis shared a look with Dick. They were both right here, safe. And so the obvious question remained: "Who do they have?" Artemis whispered.

* * *

Billy opened his eyes to a bright light. He blinked and opened them again, squinting. His whole body felt tired and ached like a really hard work out. His whole head pounded, worse than before from the alcohol. What had he been hit with? He grimaced, remembering the pain.

He was tied arms and feet to a metal chair. He looked down and could see a puddle from where his sopping clothes had dripped water onto the floor. A flash of fear flipped his stomach. What did they want from him? Were they going to kill him?

He wet his lips. They were numb from the cold.

"I think you've m-made a mistake," he called out, voice high and scratchy from nerves. "I don't have important parents, so you can go out there and kidnap someone else."

Billy heard soft laughter from close behind him that raised the hairs on his neck and made him shiver.

"That's where you're wrong, William," a man said. Billy clenched his jaw when he heard his name, how did he know it? "I happen to think your parents are very important." The soft, sardonic laughter again. "Well at least one of them."

The man's shoes clicked as he walked around to the front of Billy. Billy gasped. "It's good to see you again, William, even in these circumstances."

Billy looked up at the man in the suit and felt every emotion and memory flooding back down his throat and out unto his tongue. "I heard you were dead." he said.

Billy's father opened his hands wide, rings blinking under the lights. "What did Twain say? The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated."

Billy grimaced at his father's grin, and struggled in his restraints, rope biting into his wrists.

"Go to hell," Billy spat on the floor.

His father pulled up a chair and sat backwards on it, leaning over the backrest. He tapped his hands against the metal chair, rings clinking harshly. The bottom of his face was in shadow, and Billy could smell cloves on his breath.

"But, my boy," he said, "we are already there."


	15. Chapter 15: Shooting Stars

Chapter 15: Shooting Stars

His phone woke him. He lay on his back in the dark for a moment. He'd kicked his sheets into a tangled mess at the bottom of his bed. He reached across to the other side. But there was nothing there except the bed sheet so cold it felt damp. He blinked away the fog of sleep. Of course there wasn't.

He'd sweated in the night and his shirt was soaked through. He checked his alarm clock. 11:18. Was it really that early? He found himself completely exhausted by seven these days. The phone's ringing was shrill and persistent.

He flicked his lamp on and reached across to the phone.

"Detective Martin Capooche."

"Hi Marty, sorry to wake you up. There's been a call from the school you've been looking into." It was Dave, his old partner from years ago–a good cop, and a better man.

Capooche tried to gather his thoughts. "Gotham Academy?" he said.

He had been looking into the school since Bette's disappearance, but had been met by the faculty with what seemed like false assurances and polite smiles as they implied he was looking in the wrong direction. He knew something was going on, but he couldn't seem to find anything. It was like all the secrets were hidden beneath the skin of a frozen lake, but try as he might he couldn't break through. It was frustrating to say the least. Capooche gritted his teeth and sat up.

"Yeah," Dave continued. "There was a call to 911 claiming shots were fired. We thought it was a prank at first by one of the dorm boys, but another group of teens walking near the school called it in a minute or two later. Could be nothing, but…" Dave trailed off, the words unsaid. Shots fired at a school where dormitories were. The results could be catastrophic.

Capooche pinched the bridge of his nose, suddenly wide awake. "Have you sent a car?"

"Yeah, they've just left now. Thought you'd want to know."

"Thanks, Dave. I'm coming in now."

"No, don't wo–" Capooche hung up. A notification popped up on his screen showing a missed call from fifteen minutes ago. He recognised the number. Billy–he hadn't left a message. Capooche called him back, but immediately didn't get through. His phone was either turned off or engaged. Capooche groaned as he got to his feet. He was getting too old for this. Sarah had been saying that for years. He looked down at the pale ring of flesh around his ring finger, and then glanced at the drawer under the table.

He opened the drawer. The rings were still there. Of course they were. They lay in the centre of the otherwise bare drawer. He stared at them for a moment, then slammed the drawer shut. The alarm clock fell off the top, and rolled to Capooche's feet.

Ignoring the clock, he pulled on a pair of pants, picked a shirt off the floor, and ran his face under the sink in cold water. He grabbed his keys and ID off the kitchen bench and his coat off its hook, and locked his front door. Capooche jogged down the cramped apartment stairs, wincing with each step. He had work to do.

* * *

"Where are you going?" Artemis said. "The guards are gone from outside, now's our chance to escape."

Dick was looking out the classroom door, checking the corridor. "They think they've caught whoever was snooping around. What's the bet the office is unguarded?"

"We're not going to the office," Artemis said.

"Why not? Now might be our only chance to see if there's a clue there before everything gets wiped clean."

Artemis strode over to him, and grabbed his wrist as he was opening the door. The door banged shut. He was looking away from her, but she saw his jaw clench in anger. He twisted his wrist in the direction of her thumb and her grip on him broke. She was surprised. He was stronger than he looked. They paused. Artemis could see white marks on his wrist from where she had gripped him. She felt a surge of guilt, but pushed it down.

"Dick, whoever is involved in this _shot_ at me. Get that into your head. These are not nice people."

"Whoever it was obviously doesn't have very good aim."

She threw her hands up in frustration. Of course he responded glibly with a joke. "You're not taking this seriously enough," Artemis said. "You could die."

"I am taking this seriously," he said. "In case you've forgotten, Bette was my friend first. You've barely known her for two days. You don't even know her favourite colour."

"Do you know what damage a bullet does to you when it goes through you?"

"Yes," he said softly. "I do. I live in Gotham, of course I do."

It looked like she'd upset him. Artemis looked down at her hands. She didn't know what to say, how to explain how dangerous it was. She couldn't morally put a civilian _child_ in this sort of danger.

"I'm going with or without you," he said. "So you can follow me and help, or you can leave me alone at the mercy of the mystery gun-wielding man and all of his henchmen." Dick slipped out through the door, and Artemis cursed.

She looked back out the window at the empty expanse of the grounds. She noticed a light-pole to one side lit up dully, the light not even reaching the ground underneath it. It illuminated the individual droplets of rain as they fell past. She could see the city lights in the distance. She imagined her own apartment lights joining with the rest of the city to make the horizon glow. She thought of the warmth of her bed, the smell of bacon and eggs when she woke in the morning, her mother saying goodnight around a mouthful of toothpaste and her toothbrush stuck out like it was a cigarette. She thought of Bette's smile her first day at Gotham, and the man's cold voice that spoke to her as he walked off, like she was worth nothing compared to him.

"Screw it," she said, and ran out the door after Dick hoping she could catch him before he got far. He was waiting just outside the door. He unfolded himself from against the wall, and smiled at her as if he had known already exactly she was going to do before she did it.

"Shut up," she said. "You won't be laughing when both of us get shot." He sniggered and she found herself laughing too, trying to choke it down to keep quiet in case there were any guards around, which just made her laugh more. It was nerves she knew, but she laughed out all the empty space in her stomach, and after they were both done laughing, and Artemis wiped her eyes, she felt warm and not quite so empty.

* * *

Capooche tapped his fingers impatiently as the boy checked over his ID. He was soaked from the short walk inside and was making a puddle on the floor. He glanced outside, the rain was pouring off the roof in a curtain.

"Listen, son, I'm in a bit of a rush–" Capooche broke off, coughing. He patted his pockets, but couldn't find a handkerchief. He coughed into his hands. When finally the fit passed, Capooche opened his hands to see flecks of blood. He grimaced, and wiped them on the underside of his shirt.

"You're all clear, sir," the boy, young man, said.

"Thank you," Capooche said and swiped his card off the boy and walked into the precinct. As usual, the precinct was bustling and loud, a sea of dark uniforms and bright, shiny badges. Phones rang and keyboards clacked as reports and warrants were written. It smelled like sweat and stale coffee. He nodded hello to the other cops, some of whom he knew were corrupt. In Gotham, you had to pick your battles.

Dave came up to him as he was signing out a handgun.

"What are you doing, Marty?"

"What does it look like, Dave." Capooche clipped his badge onto his belt. He shrugged off his coat and pulled on the shoulder holster. He checked the gun's ammo, and clipped the gun back together and stuck it into the holster and pulled his black coat back on.

"The car's on its way back."

Capooche paused. "Already?"

"Yeah, apparently a teacher came out and said it was a group of students letting off fireworks. They still had a look around, but nothing unusual."

"Which teacher?"

"I don't know."

He'd take his own car and not a police cruiser. Something was going on at that blasted school, and he was going to find out what even if it killed him. "Capooche!" Dave called out. "Where are you going?"

"This whole thing stinks, Dave. It fucking stinks." Capooche walked faster, the precinct door slid open and he was out into the night and under the lashing rain. He ducked his head under the rain, and stared at his own feet in front of him ploughing through the puddled tarmac.

Dave had to jog behind him to keep up.

As he walked, Capooche felt the aches and pains from the years sliding away. The ache in his right hip from a grazed bullet years ago fell away, and so did the persistent pain in his chest.

He felt like a younger man.

He started coughing again when he reached his car, great retching coughs that shook his whole body so that he had to lean against his car door for the support. He wiped his mouth and stood back upright. Dave pushed forward until he was in his face.

"You're not well, Marty. You should be retiring."

"Retiring to what?" Capooche shouted. "Your daughter's not dead, Dave. Your wife hasn't left you to sleep alone in your too large bloody bed. So go home and enjoy them while you can, and leave me the blasted hell alone."

Dave's face contorted in a pained look. "I'm sorry, Marty."

"No, I am," Capooche said, instantly remorseful. "I shouldn't have shouted." They stood in silence for a while. The rain poured down on them. Sarah had loved the rain. Still did, probably.

Their first kiss had been under the rain. It had started storming while they were in an art gallery. Everyone had stopped looking at the art and gone out to the floor-to-ceiling glass windows and watched the rain pour down in sheets, the wind blowing it in patterns. She had laughed and pulled him outside, just under the roof and in front of the rain overflowing the gutters. People were watching from inside, bemused. They must of thought they were crazy, or in love. There wasn't much difference, Capooche thought.

"What are you doing?" He had shouted to her above the storm.

"Living!" She had yelled back and ran out squealing into the rain, arms raised up like lightning. She had pulled him into her and they had kissed. And that's when he knew: he wanted her forever.

After Chloe had died, they had stayed together. They had picked up the pieces. They repainted her room in the house. And put all her toys into storage. Her bedroom was a too-white cavern that they both refused to look into. They kept the door shut. But they could see the little hint of yellow from the brass doorknob poking out at them whenever they sat down to eat or watch tv. So he had taken the door of its hinges and left it outside for the landlord to find. He refused to let their grief be a room in their lives. And it worked. Three months later, Sarah was pregnant and Capooche was back to work. They had pinned up the ultrasounds around their room like wallpaper. The nurse asked if they wanted to know the sex, and they smiled and shook their heads.

Capooche could still remember the sterile smell of the hospital, and the practised empathetic face the nurse had pulled on like a surgeon's mask before: "miscarriage." Sarah went into a state of depression, and Capooche would come home in the evenings to see her exactly where he had left her, staring out their bedroom window. And one night he came home to the ring and a note on the kitchen bench. _I'm sorry. I will always love you._ And she was gone.

He had found her again, months later, when he started looking–he was a detective, after all. She had moved interstate, and Capooche had sat in his car for hours, staring at her shadow moving around her little apartment window lit up yellow, imagining himself in there beside her. He wanted nothing more than to get up out of his car and climb up to her apartment and knock on the door. He imagined each reaction: she'd laugh and hug him, or slam the door in his face, or smile gently and invite him inside for coffee.

But life didn't work like that, and he knew that everything had an expiration date. So he had driven home alone, heater set to maximum, fogging up the windows. Dave finally convinced him to take off his ring. But he hadn't started dating again. He had spent twenty-one years of his life getting to know one person. Working out her unique code. She liked drinking cappuccinos after dinner, and then would complain when she couldn't sleep. She liked the apartment cool, even in winter, but her feet grew cold easily, so she kept pairs of woollen fluffy socks–the brighter the colour, the better–in her top drawer. In fact, those were all she kept in her top drawer–they were stuffed in from top to bottom. He probably still had them.

After she had left he couldn't bear to see little reminders of her around. Even the smallest of things: the bright clips she bought to close shut bags of opened muesli, stray hairpins he still picked out of the carpet months later. So he had packed up every single thing of hers he could find with the intention of throwing it all out, but he couldn't bear to do it, so he stored it all in plastic containers in some warehouse in Gotham. At the last minute he had decided to keep the ring in the drawer. Just one tangible reminder of her.

A car pulled out, and Dave lifted his hand at the driver. Capooche blinked back to the present and crossed his arms against the cold and rain.

"I've got to save this little girl, Dave. I've got to."

"I get it Marty. I really do. But you're not well. Everyone in the precinct knows. You should be taking time off to get better, not standing under the rain chasing some fantasy at night."

"I'm not getting better, Dave." Capooche started laughing but stopped as Dave's eyes found his own. Capooche looked down.

"How long?" Dave said.

Capooche shrugged. "A few months, a year tops."

"You should've told me."

Capooche nodded. "I know."

Someone came out of the precinct and was shouting for Dave. "I have to go," Dave said. "Take care of yourself, Marty." He paused as if he was going to say something else, but just patted Capooche on the shoulder and then was jogging off back to the precinct.

Capooche opened the car door, and sat dripping in the driver's seat. The rain drummed on the roof. He pulled out his packet of smokes and his lighter, stuck a soggy cigarette in his mouth. The lighter refused to light, it was too wet.

Capooche groaned and leant his head against the steering wheel. He rummaged through his glove box for a lighter. There was nothing there. As he pulled his hand back out, something fell out too. He leaned across the passenger's seat and picked it up. It was a photo. Him and Sarah holding Chloe's little hand, plump with youth and the promise of growth. He was looking straight at the camera, but Sarah was staring down lovingly at Chloe, a smile on her face. Capooche had forgotten this was in there.

He wiped the photo dry on the seat, and placed it up on his windshield where he could see it while driving. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and put it back in its packet. He started the car, and it thrummed with power. He pulled out of the precinct and was speeding by the time he reached the road. He could get to Gotham Academy in thirty minutes if he pushed it. He wound down his window and threw the cigarettes and his lighter out of the window, they were lost immediately in the darkness. The car leaped forward, scything through the rain and night like a silver knife cutting through a dark curtain.

* * *

The office was empty, and the lights were off. Artemis and Dick peeked around the corner, looking for guards or someone, but no one was there. The hallway was empty. It was unguarded, exactly like Dick had thought.

Dick looked at her and raised his eyebrows: I told you so, he seemed to say. Artemis rolled her eyes in response. Dick tried the door. It was locked. Artemis pulled out her makeshift lock-pick, but by the time she had done so Dick was already turning the handle of the office door and stepping inside. Artemis frowned. It seemed Dick Grayson was full of surprises.

Artemis followed Dick inside. It was silent, except for the dim sound of rain. She pulled the door shut with a click. She turned her phone light on and had a look around the front desk, while Dick walked through to one of the back rooms. There were papers strewn across it, which she flicked through, but nothing caught her eye of any importance. There was a half drunk coffee mug next to the keyboard. The bottom looked like mud. It had an oily shine.

It was like any other office.

She rifled through the drawers, looking up when Dick entered back into the room. "Anything?" She asked in that half-whisper, half-talking voice. "Anything?" She repeated louder.

He shook his head. "They might have something on the computer, though." He sat down into the desk chair. Artemis quickly rifled through the rest of the drawers but found nothing but stationary and envelopes and a dead spider.

"Doesn't it have a password?" she asked.

"Most likely," Dick said.

"So how are you going to get in?"

"I'll try the usual combinations," he said. "You know, one-two-three-four, receptionists-are-cool-but-underpaid, etcetera. Why don't you look in the filing cabinet in the other room? There might be something in Bette's."

Artemis nodded, and stepped out into the other room. Everything looked pale and grey in her phone light except for the massive rows of black cabinets that took up most of the room. There was a small window set up high in the room, foggy and cobwebbed. In fact, the whole room looked like it hadn't been cleaned in a while. Artemis wiped her finger over the top of the nearest cabinet, and it came away coated white in dust, like she'd stuck her finger into a storm cloud.

The cabinets weren't locked, which surprised her. She thought the school would be more concerned about protecting their student's information. She opened the first cabinet, to find all the A's. She shut it, picked another cabinet further down and tested that, until she reached K. As she was opening the cabinet she saw that the letters were actually written on the front, and she hadn't noticed them before.

Artemis flicked through the differing file sizes of K, until she reached Elizabeth KANE. She pulled out her file. She was surprised that the school still used paper filing, instead of just a computer system. She opened the file, and something slid out onto the ground. Artemis picked it up. It was a greyscale copy of a photo of Bette. She was smiling in her uniform. Artemis guessed she would be one or two years younger than she was now. Her hair was pulled back into a braid. Artemis put the photo down and looked through the rest of the file. Medical and Academic records, a report of when Bette had apparently fallen down at school and hit her head which was dated two years ago, and not much else. It was a dead end.

As Artemis was sliding back the file into the cabinet she thought of something else. The other girl that had apparently disappeared before Bette. What was her name? Emily? Amalia. That was it.

Artemis leant out the door. "What was Amalia's last name?"

Dick looked up from where he had been busy typing into the computer. His face was lit up from the computer screen, in a sickly sort of light. He frowned. "Evans, I think. Why?"

Artemis didn't reply and ducked back into the room. She searched for the cabinet with E on it, opened it, and trawled through the names. She found it. It was a thick file. Artemis stared at the name written in large black blocky letters. She opened it. A small photo of Amalia was in the top right corner of the page. Artemis blinked down at it. She had pigtails, and dark hair. She looked like she was frowning at the camera. Artemis read through all her files. Amalia apparently had been a troublesome student; her files were full of reports from teachers who complained about her behaviour in class and about her missing class and assessment. Artemis flicked through to the end, there was one line printed in red ink: transferred to villesburough.

Artemis googled it on her phone. It was a school for troubled children in Switzerland. The internet page for the school flicked through photos of the grounds and rooms. It looked more like a dungeon than a school. The grass was clipped short, the trees stooped against the wind, the colour palette was dull and grey. It looked miserable. Artemis felt a pang of sympathy for the girl. But it had all been a false lead. Amalia had nothing to do with Bette.

Artemis sighed and stood up, stretching. She rubbed her eyes, they hurt slightly from straining to read all the fine print.

"Find anything interesting?" Dick asked, standing at the doorway.

Artemis shook her head, looked down at the folder, and then placed it back in the cabinet drawer and shut it. "Interesting, but nothing useful."

"Me neither."

"Did you get into the computer system?" Artemis asked.

"Yeah, but I couldn't find anything important."

"It doesn't tell you who entered the false information that Bette was at Gym into the system?"

Dick shook his head. "It doesn't track the different individual computers in the system, or tell you who changed what. But it had to be a teacher. Or someone with a password."

"Unless the Gym teacher was wrong." Artemis said. "And thought Bette was there."

"Do we have the same teacher?" Dick said. "He's the biggest stickler for rules at the school, he didn't make a mistake. It has to be something else."

"There was a woman…" Artemis said slowly, remembering. "With the man with the gun. It sounded like she was being bribed or blackmailed to help him."

"Any idea who?"

Artemis shook her head. "They were talking about an operation. She wanted it to move ahead, but he said to wait until tomorrow. Or the day after. I can't remember. But why were the office lights on?" She looked around into the dark corners of the office. The shadow of the cabinets crept up the walls. "What were they doing here?"

Artemis's phone light died suddenly, and she looked down at it. Her phone had run out of battery. There was something that she was missing… it was right there, something obvious, but she couldn't grab hold of it with her mind–it was like trying to catch a ball while covering one eye.

She took out the torch Dick had given back to her from her utility belt, and flicked it on and off absently.

"It's lucky I don't have epilepsy," Dick said.

"I don't think we're going to find anything else here," Artemis said, ignoring the jibe. "Let's go home."

"What about the person the guards said they caught?"

Artemis shrugged. "Well it's not us. It must be a mistake. Ugh." She felt like shouting in frustration. It felt like they were so close to what was going on. But so close wasn't good enough. "And the guards are obviously working for the man in the suit."

Dick nodded. "They wouldn't need guards if they weren't hiding something," Dick said. "And you getting shot at means we're on the right track."

"The right track isn't good enough," Artemis said. "Whatever's going on we don't have long to figure it out." An image of Bette tied up and gagged flashed through Artemis's imagination again, and she gritted her teeth.

Dick put his hand on her shoulder. "Let's get some rest. We have school in the morning. We can look around again tomorrow."

Artemis nodded. Whatever was going on was a conspiracy, helped along by someone high up enough in the school to be allowed to hire guards, and input information into the school system. How did the adults let this happen! She frowned and rubbed her temples. She knew that she'd forgotten something that could help her. Maybe after some sleep she'd remember it.

They slipped through the corridors like mice, and Artemis watched Dick climb down from the window. It had stopped raining, but the wall still looked slippery. Artemis followed him, placing the window back into its frame, and climbing down the wall. She slipped once, and her breath caught for a moment, but she managed to hold herself up with just her arms as she found another foothold.

She met Dick at the bottom. They waited to see if any guards were about, but they had all vanished suddenly, like a summer storm, and the way was clear. They climbed over the gate, and jogged away, not noticing the black car sidling up inconspicuously across the road, or the old man huddled within it. Artemis's breath fogged up in front of her, and she pulled her hoodie tighter around her. She looked back at Gotham Academy. Its windows were dark, and wisps of clouds threaded around the roof, there was no sign that they had ever been there. She kept jogging until Gotham Academy was hidden behind a bend. Artemis and Dick stopped and caught their breath for a moment. And then they kept running.

* * *

His father dragged his chair forward, the metal screeching on the floor. His knees touched Billy's. Billy looked down, refusing to meet his father's eyes. He tried to comprehend everything but his mind was like a ball of string that he was watching unravel. This was definitely his father, he could see it in the shadows between his knuckles, and the way he talked, like nothing in the world mattered more than him right now. He was dead and now he wasn't. He was in prison and now he wasn't. Nothing seemed to make sense anymore.

"Look at me, boy."

Billy looked up. His father's eyes were wild; they seemed to flicker with fire.

Billy's father pulled a knife out of a sheath hidden before by his jacket, and leant forward. The light gleamed dangerously off the blade; the handle was leather and worn smooth.

Billy struggled, rocking back on his chair.

"Ah, you really think I would hurt you?" His father tutted. "My own son? Although you did help put me in Ravensgate, I've forgiven you. I was watching you in court, Billy. And while at first I was filled with this _rage_ , I soon came to the conclusion that it wasn't your fault. You had been poisoned," he spat the word out vehemently, spittle flying into Billy's face, "by your mother, that detective, that you were, are, still my son. You shall not be punished like they will."

He lifted the knife delicately up toward Billy, and pressed the very tip against Billy's right cheekbone. Billy froze. He glanced down at the knife but winced as it made the knife cut deeper. His father pulled the knife away. "Now look what you made me do." He reached up and wiped his thumb across Billy's cheek. His hand was surprisingly cold and Billy shivered. Billy could see his blood on his thumb. His father reached his thumb up to his mouth and licked him clean.

"You're sick, you know that right." Billy said, disgusted.

"Now, now, no need for mean words." His father bent over and cut through the rope bindings on Billy's hands and feet, whistling as he sawed. The rope frayed and snapped apart. Billy rubbed his wrists from where the rope had cut into them, and stood up, kicking aside the rope tendrils and walking back, creating distance between him and his father. His legs felt wobbly. He reached around to touch the back of his head, and it was crusty with dried blood.

Billy looked around. They were in the large hall the school used for assemblies and formal gatherings. The rest of the chairs were packed away, and the hall seemed so large and cavernous with just the two of them there. There was a lamp set up near the two chairs, and that was what had been so bright. Billy struggled to pull his thoughts together.

"Why are you here?" he said.

His father smirked, so self-satisfied that Billy wanted to punch the smile straight off him. "Why are any of us here?"

"No, here, Gotham Academy."

"Well I had to begin my operations again. I owe some very dangerous people some very large sums of money. And why Gotham Academy in particular? After someone tipped me off about a certain William _Borden_ , I thought this would be the chance for us to reconnect." His father smiled at him, talking as if it were as simple as going out onto the front lawn to play catch, or take Billy to his football games.

"Are you serious?"

"Very."

"I watched you beat up my mother for fourteen years."

"We all have skeletons in our closets."

"But yours are all people you've killed."

His father laughed, and shook his finger. Billy had upset him, he could see. He turned away, and when he turned back his face had an ugly snarl, so different to the façade of the well-mannered, mild-tempered businessman. And it was a façade, Billy knew. His father was a good looking house on the outside, with a carefully cultivated garden with neat little rows of bluebells, while inside it was rotten, the third stair sagged, rain leaked in through the moulding corners.

"She disrespected _me_!" he snarled. His eyes seemed to bulge out of their sockets.

Billy didn't say anything and just smiled back. He had broken through the mask. His father wiped spittle off his chin, and loosened his slim black tie.

"I'm sorry about before," his father said, "the tying up, the bright light, and the Taser. Someone thought you were someone else. Come on out," he called, and he guard who had caught Billy walked out from the back of the hall, slowly, like an insect afraid of a bird. The doors banged shut behind him. His father beckoned impatiently like a drunk asking for a larger shot at a bar, and the man came forward reluctantly.

"What do you say?" His father said in the voice reserved for small children and dogs.

"I'm sorry," the guard said.

"It's alright," Billy said softly.

"Pardon?" His father asked.

"I said it's alright," Billy said.

"But he hurt you, for no reason," his father said. "As you grow older, William, you will realise that there are not many rules in this life. So you have to make some up, and then make people follow them, if you want to lead. When someone hurts you, or someone close to you, you make them pay." His father's shoes clicked on the floor as he walked over to Billy. Each click seemed to travel up the floor, through his legs and all the way up to his heart. Until everything seemed to feel like it would burst, and his father was next to him, breath hot in his ear. "That's the way the world works, son."

Billy looked the guard in the eyes. Billy could see dark sweat patches under his armpits. He looked terrified. There was a freckle at the corner of his mouth, like a crumb yet to be wiped away. Billy could see all the places he had missed shaving.

"I forgive you," Billy said. The guard breathed a deep sigh of relief.

Silence hovered in the air like a hawk.

"But I don't," his father said, breaking the silence.

Without another word, and before Billy could do anything but open his mouth in surprise, his father pulled a gun out of his jacket pocket and shot the guard in the head. Billy's ears rang with a high pitched sound. Something wet was splattered across his face. He reached a hand up and wiped it, and looked at his hand. It was blood. The guard fell to the ground unceremoniously.

"Why?" Billy said, but couldn't hear his own words. Everything buzzed like the hall was filled with flies.

Billy saw his father's lips move, but couldn't hear what he said. When he finished, his father smiled slowly. He looked pleased with himself.

Billy stumbled away from the guard and threw up. He looked around for something to lean on, but the hall was bare and empty, except for the chair, his father, and the… no, don't look at that.

His ears kept ringing.

"Aren't you worried someone will have heard the gunshot?" He tried to say, but couldn't hear anything. He imagined his voice sounding dull and flat and dead.

His father tucked the gun back away like a magic trick: look what I can disappear, and spread his fingers. His fingers looked like little pale worms.

"Who is there left to come?" he seemed to say. He beckoned at Billy. Billy saw his lips move but heard only the ringing. It felt like his ears were full of blood. He lifted his fingers up to his ear and then back down, but there was nothing there.

Billy wiped a thread of saliva from his mouth. He looked at the turned back of his father, who had already started walking away, confident Billy would follow him. Billy looked back at the slumped form of the guard, deadly still on the floor. He spat on the ground and walked slowly after his father. What choice did he have?

Outside, the stars looked like exit wounds.


	16. Chapter 16: Cough, cough, Who's there?

Chapter 16: Cough, cough, who's there?

Capooche heard the gunshot as he was stepping out of his car. He paused for a second, one foot in the car and one outside. He looked over the roof of his car at Gotham Academy. Nothing stirred. The air grew silent. It was as if nothing had happened. The night was like a black lake slowly smoothing over, ripples from the gunshot vanishing before his eyes.

It was still raining.

"Screw it," he said.

He popped his boot, and reached in for the cardboard box shoved into one corner. He pulled out the bulletproof vest he kept in there. It had sat in his boot without being used for ten years. Sarah had bought it for him.

He shrugged off his coat, and put the vest on. It still fit him. He put his coat back on, drew his gun, checked his ammo, and moved swiftly towards the school, coattails flaring behind him.

Adrenaline pumped through him. His hands tingled. It had been a long time since he had been in any sort of combat.

He hoped he didn't have a heart attack.

He stopped in front of the gate to catch his breath. His face was soaked from the rain, and he wiped water from his face like it was sweat. He grabbed the gate and made a half-hearted attempt of pulling himself up. The metal was wet, and gritty with rust.

He grimaced. Stop dicking around, he told himself.

He holstered his gun, grabbed the gate with both hands, and pushed his feet against the gate for more purchase. He hauled himself upwards, but he still couldn't reach the top of the gate with his arms. He scrabbled at the metal with his feet, but his wet soles squeaked and slid off.

Don't half ass things. That's what Sarah used to tell him. He shut his eyes, and groaning, muscles straining, pushed himself over the top of the gate. His front half was hanging over into the schoolyard. The gate dug into his ribs, just above his sternum.

He overbalanced.

He had time to gasp before he hit the ground on the other side. His breath was knocked out of him. Pain flooded his ankle. He lay on the ground wheezing, until worried about lying in the open, he slowly shuffled through the mud behind a tree.

After he had caught his breath back, he probed at his ankle. He didn't think it was broken.

He pulled himself up using the tree, and tentatively put his weight on the foot. He could still walk without too much pain. But when he tried to move any faster, his ankle twinged with pain like it was being stabbed through with a long thin needle.

Walking would have to do.

There were no lights on in the main building. But that wasn't what he was worried about. He had to check on the dorms, make sure that the kids were okay.

He went as fast as his ankle would let him. The rain grew heavier. He could barely hear anything over the rush of it and the pounding of blood in his ears. Someone could sneak up on him, and he wouldn't be any the wiser until the cold barrel of a gun was pressed to the side of his head.

His feet sunk down into the muddy slush of the ground.

He'd been in worse situations than this before. But always with someone he'd trusted by his side, holding another gun. He was regretting coming alone.

He pulled out his phone, having a hard time unlocking it because of all the rain. He called Dave. Capooche shuffled from foot to foot. The rain had squirrelled its way inside his jacket like a snake searching for warmth. He pulled his coat up higher.

"Come on, Dave. Pickup, goddamnit."

The call rung out.

He saw a light flickering ahead of him. Startled, he raised his second hand up to his gun, dropping his phone.

He crouched down, moving forward. The light was further away than it had looked.

Behind him, his phone lay in the muddy ground. Capooche followed the light further into the darkness.

* * *

Billy walked in silence. His ears still rang. His father whistled ahead of him, grating, out of tune, eyrie.

His father had killed that man. Just shot him in cold blood. Billy remembered the look on the guard's face, the glisten of sweat on his forehead. The fear in his eyes.

His father raised his gun. The man slumped.

It replayed in Billy's head over and over again.

"Where are we going?" Billy asked.

The whistling stopped. His father turned his head slightly.

"Hush," his father said.

Billy fell silent. His father started whistling again.

Billy's hands were still shaking. He clenched his hands into fists, felt his fingernails dig into the palms of his hands, and pressed harder, relishing the pain. It didn't feel real. His father was alive, at his school, and he had just murdered a man in front of him. Not to mention the gunfire he had heard before he had been tased. Who else had been hurt?

Billy studied the sleek matte black of his father's suit. It was expensive. His father had always had expensive taste. Billy could still remember the time his father had hit him because he had taken a fine china plate out of a cabinet. His father liked pretty things.

And yet, Billy could see his father's pants fraying at the bottom. Slightly too long, and tucked up at the bottom rather than tailored. When his father stepped forward, the pants rode up, and Billy could see the flash of pale ankle.

His father had said he was broke and in-debt. Billy believed it. His father had always been honest. Well, as honest as a criminal could be. If he said he was going to hit you, he would hit you. If he said he would chop off the fingers of men betrayed him, well… Billy had heard the stories.

But why was his father here, at Gotham Academy? Was it really as simple as wanting to find Billy? His father hated things he couldn't control. Hated things he had lost control over. Nothing was ever as simple as it first appeared. What was his play?

They walked in silence for a while more. They passed around the side of the main building, and out from under the eaves. His father reached into a pocket and pulled out an umbrella, which unfurled like an oyster above him.

His father beckoned him under the umbrella. Billy hesitated for a second, but then joined him. The rain drummed onto the umbrella above them. His father put an arm around his shoulder, close to his neck, and Billy hunched down. He swallowed back any retort. He wanted to throw the arm off him, but he couldn't. He knew his father wouldn't like that. He could smell the clove smoke that hung around his father. It stuck in the back of his throat like a fishbone, or severed tongue.

They squelched their way across the muddy grass. Billy surreptitiously patted his pockets, but his phone was gone. His father must have taken it. Billy glanced at his father's jacket, where the gun was. Maybe he could grab it. Then what? Could–

"Looking for a way out?" his father's words interrupted all of his thoughts.

His father was looking straight at him, eyes dark and beady.

Billy shook his head. His tongue felt heavy and thick. "Just admiring your jacket," he lied.

His father stared at him for a second longer, and Billy forced himself not to look away. "Well it is Armani," his father said eventually.

They were now at the side of the school, next to the dormitory buildings. They walked up to the burned girl's dormitory.

"But it's being repaired," Billy said as his father led him past the covered up and locked front entrance of the girl's dormitory. "There was a fire."

His father turned back to him and raised an eyebrow. The corner of his mouth tilted up into a smirk. "Was there?" he said.

There was a side door, rusty, and locked shut with a padlock. His father unlocked it, and opened the door. There was no screech of rust like Billy had expected, the door slid open as gently and smoothly as oil on water.

The door opened up into a hallway, lit from above by a bare halogen light bulb. They walked past the hallway until it opened out into a recognisable format, a row of beds with a bathroom on the end. A man dressed like the other guards nodded hello to his father. Billy looked around wide-eyed. The windows were shuttered close, and locked. It was a prison. Something moved in the corner, and unpeeled up from a bed. Lank mess of hair, barefooted. The person moved closer into the light, and Billy's jaw slackened in disbelief.

The person in front of him was unmistakeable.

"I believe you two know each other," his father said, and moved over to talk to the guard. Billy couldn't hear anything they were saying, air was rushing in his ears. He got that feeling you get when you stare at something for so long you don't know what you're looking at anymore.

He studied the dirty face of the girl standing in front of him.

"Bette," Billy breathed.

* * *

"Are you okay?" Billy asked.

Bette looked over at the guard with distaste. "It could be worse," she said, "they haven't touched me. Does anyone else know about this?" She leant in close to him. "Is someone else coming to help us?"

Billy shook his head. "Everyone thinks you've disappeared. Kidnapped or murdered, no one knows anything. There's a cop looking into it. But I don't think he's going to find much. We're on our own."

Billy looked Bette over. She looked dirty. Her eyes were big and bright. She was still dressed in her school uniform. It looked like she hadn't changed since her 'disappearance.'

"I've been stuck here for days. I've lost count of how many."

"It's been less than a week," Billy said.

"It feels like longer," Bette said and looked down. They lapsed into silence.

"Why, though?" Billy asked. "What do they want from you?"

Bette chewed on her fingernails. Billy looked at her hand. All of her fingernails were bitten to the quick, red-raw and bleeding. Her hand dropped to her side.

"I've been digging around since Amalia left," she said. "The office told me she had left to go to some disciplinary boarding school in the middle of nowhere, but I knew that couldn't be true, she would have told me. I stumbled onto something much bigger."

"What?"

"It started a few months ago," Bette said. "The school has been covering up students disappearing. Female students." She pointed at his father and raised her voice. "I think that _he's_ been selling girls for profit into a prostitution ring."

"Well, you are a smart girl, aren't you?" His father sauntered over. He clapped a hand down hard on Billy's shoulder, and he winced.

Billy frowned, and pushed his father's arm off him. His father looked down in surprise. "I'm going to get you out of here," Billy said.

His father laughed and clapped his hands together. But his words came out heavy. "Now, now, William. Didn't I teach you not to lie." Billy recognised the tone. His father's hands were clenched by his sides. It had always surprised him how quick his temper changed, like popcorn exploding in the microwave.

"You're selling children as slaves into prostitution?" Billy shook his head in disgust. He felt his lip curling up. "You're disgusting."

"And you're my son," he said. "Doesn't that automatically put you on my side? Blood of the family runs thicker than…" his father shook his fingers like he was sending a waiter away. "Well, other blood. I brought you here, so you could finally see. I locked you out of my world in the past and look where that got our family? Now that you know what I'm doing, and why I'm doing it, you can join me. We can turn it into a… family business."

Billy felt anger curling up inside his stomach. He knew he should be scared, but he wasn't. He was angry. Angry at this man who had ruined his childhood, and so many other people's lives.

"You're not my father." Billy spat on the ground in contempt.

Suddenly he was on the floor clutching the side of his face, grimacing in pain. His father had hit him.

His father shook his hand; Billy could see blood on his knuckles. Everything was spinning.

"Show me some respect," his father said. "I wouldn't have to be doing this if you hadn't sent me to prison in the first place. All I ever wanted was to live a normal life, with a normal loving family."

Billy looked up. From where he was lying down, his father looked tall, and massive, like the shadow of a tree stretched out in the night.

"You've been doing this long before you went to prison."

"True. Oh well, what's that saying about the leopard and his spots? I guess above all, I'm a man of habit."

"You disgust me," Billy said slowly and carefully, enunciating every bit of every word carefully like they were made of glass. He pushed himself upright on the floor. The wooden boards underneath him were hard and offered no comfort. His father rocked back like he had been slapped.

"Billy…" Bette warned.

"Listen to the girl, William. You're only here because I want you to be." His father crouched down next to him and drew the gun out of his jacket, heavy and sleek and dangerous looking. "Don't change that."

"Put the gun on the ground and step away from the children," a new voice, calm and careful. Billy's heart leaped in his chest.

Capooche emerged into the room, the light shining off his dripping face and wet, grey hair. He held a handgun up with two hands steadily. He looked like an angel that had flown in from the night.

* * *

Martin Capooche gripped the gun harder to stop his hands from shaking. His heart pounded. He allowed himself a quick glance at Billy and the girl. He recognised her from the police photo they had pinned to a board. It was Bette, safe and sound, looking a little worse for wear, and who knew what emotional trauma she had been through, but she was alive. Thank God.

"You too," he said to the man in the guard uniform that was inching closer and closer to something in his jacket pocket. Probably not a gun; a baton, or taser maybe. But he wasn't going to take any chances.

"Hands behind your head," he ordered. "I've had a tough week, and shooting two sons-of-bitches would make me feel a whole lot better."

"You're a cop," the man in the suit said, turning to look at him. "You won't shoot us." Capooche finally made out his face. He frowned.

"I thought you were dead, Mallory," Capooche said.

Mallory shrugged. "I guess like usual you were wrong, Capooche. Tell me, did it feel good to turn my wife and son against me?"

"It felt good to get them away from your abusive ass. Gun on the floor. Hands on your head. Now! I will shoot if I have to."

"You're bluffing."

"Kidnapped girl, man with a gun, it all screams reasonable use of deadly force to me."

Capooche watched in satisfaction as the gun was placed onto the floor, and Mallory put his hands on the back of his head. The guard followed suit.

"Billy, grab the gun," Capooche said, walking to the right so Billy wouldn't be in the line of fire. Billy took the gun, and held it loosely in his hand. "Cuff your father." He unclipped the cuffs he had brought and threw them to Billy. He allowed himself a small smile. He had done it. The children were safe. That was all that mattered.

He started coughing slightly. Just in the back of his throat.

"Is something wrong, detective?" Mallory said, and laughed.

"Capooche?" Billy asked.

Capooche tried to tell him he was alright. That they were both alright. For Billy to back away with the gun. But he couldn't get anything out. His chest was heaving now and he couldn't keep the gun steady. He stepped backwards, wanting to rest his back against something to hold himself up. His body shuddered and shifted. He could hardly breathe. He shuffled backwards, but his ankle twisted the wrong way, and buckled, and he fell down onto the hard floor. His ankle burned and he had hit his hip. The gun was lost from his grip, and clattered onto the ground, out of reach.

He heard a scream and Billy shouting, and he tried to sit up. He reached across to the gun, fingers scrabbling at the cold stock, trying to bring it into reach. He pulled himself forward. He had finally stopped coughing. His face was wet with something, he reached a hand up to it, looked down and it was blood. He looked down at his shirt, and he had coughed blood all over it too. He finally managed to reach the gun.

"Capooche!" Billy yelled.

He looked up, and Mallory was standing over him. Capooche groaned, and raised the gun up, but Mallory kicked it out of his hand. Capooche looked past Mallory to see Billy struggling in the guard's grip. Bette was knocked out cold on the floor.

Mallory raised the gun up, and Billy shouted something. All Capooche could hear was whining in his ears, like thousands of locusts buzzing.

Mallory said something and laughed. Probably something mean and sardonic.

Capooche looked past Mallory, he made eye contact with Billy. Billy was crying. One last job. And he had failed.

Three gunshots, and heavy impacts against his torso. For a moment, nothing, Capooche imagined that he had missed. And then pain seethed through him, like writhing hot globes of fire.

Mallory laughed and walked away. Capooche groaned, tried to drag himself away. Towards the gun or towards the door, anywhere. But all the strength inside him was seeping out. And he slumped back down onto the floor. He felt cold.

The lights flickered. A shadowy figure leapt into the room. Three more gunshots. His vision was starting to blur. Someone shouted.

He was tired.

He saw blood on the floor seeping out from underneath him, and shifted his arm. His eyelids felt heavy and he forced them to stay open. Someone was dragging him away. He groaned and tried to knock their hands away. He looked up and saw a cat grinning back at him,

"Stop it, old man, I'm trying to help."

"The girl," Capooche groaned out.

"I've got her."

"The boy."

Silence.

Capooche tried to say something. What was it he wanted to say again? Something about a boy. All of his thoughts were falling past him like a swift stream, and he couldn't grab hold of anything. He realised something: he was dying. Like all the other people in the world. He nearly wanted to laugh. Nearly.

"Come on now. Don't you dare die on me."

He gave in. And let the darkness take him.


	17. Chapter 17: Revelations

Chapter 17: Revelations

Tack woke up and immediately knew something was wrong. He crawled out of his bed, the floor cold against his feet. The air-conditioning clicked and cool air washed over his face. What time was it? He couldn't find his phone. Had he put it next to his bed? Under his pillow?

He rubbed his eyes. He hadn't been sleeping well lately. He couldn't get off to sleep. He'd stay up for hours lying in bed, turning over, listening to the sounds of the building. And when he did manage to nod off, he'd have strange vivid dreams about a girl with no face and bright, blonde hair. Bette. And now he was thinking about Hannah Crell, her wild black hair and long, long legs that seemed to stretch on a mile. He had been thinking a lot lately, but he shook her out of his head (tried to at least.)

Because something was wrong.

Tack thought back two years to when his parents had sent him to Gotham Academy. He had woken up and they had been waiting for him at the dining table. That had been the first sign. His mother's breath had smelled like mint instead of alcohol. That had been the second sign. They were holding hands. The third sign. One sign was coincidence, two signs unlucky. Three was proof.

His hands and neck prickled. He was nervous about something he couldn't explain. It felt too quiet. Where were the sounds of snoring from the other dorms? The sounds of talking from the girls that snuck into the boys' dorms? One.

He padded out to the door, checking on his roommate sleeping in the bed opposite him. He opened the door with a cool click, and stepped out onto the landing. The motion lights above him flickered on and he shivered, kept imagining something popping out in front of him while the lights strobed. But no: now the lights were fully on and nobody was there except him.

He walked down the hallway feeling like he was in a stranger's home. Don't be silly, he thought. Look, there's the mark on the wall you made sliding down the stairwell on your mattress. There's the stained patch of carpet that Robbie Strell threw up on when he snuck the alcohol into the dorm. The patch of carpet had stayed in Gotham Academy. Robbie hadn't.

Tack took a deep breath to calm himself. He had imagined everything.

Smoke billowed through the air-conditioning.

What was that? Two.

Tack stepped forward and started coughing. He covered his mouth with the bottom of his shirt and tried not to breathe. What was happening?

He heard similar sounds of coughing echoing throughout the dorm like it were a hospital in a middle of a flu epidemic.

He had to get out of there.

He stumbled down the hall, trying to breathe as little as possible. Was there a fire like what happened with the girl's old dorm?

Wait no, he couldn't get out of there. He had to help the others. He turned around and hurried back down the hallway, banging as loudly as he could on every door. The smoke kept coming. It was getting hard to see. Stinging his eyes. He coughed.

Wait, why was he slouched down against the wall? He pushed himself back up. Tears from the smoke were running down his face. He crawled forward. Just a little more. The edges of his vision were blurring and turning dark.

What was that? His hands found purchase against the obstacle in front of him. What was it? He pushed his hands up. They were shoes! Someone else had made it out! He tried to stand up, but there was a pressure against his back. The person's hand.

"Help me," he croaked out, looking up at the person hidden in the smoke.

A gas-masked face leaned down over him and Tack whimpered. Three.

"Now why would I do that?" the figure said., then laughed.

Tack was coughing uncontrollably now. His heart thumped with uncontrollable terror. He had to... He had to get out of here. He had to—

He slumped back to the floor. He was vaguely aware of someone dragging him away. Then nothing.

* * *

Her mum had woken her, which was strange, Artemis had an alarm for that. Then her mum had asked her if she knew anything about what was going on at Gotham Academy and Artemis blinked away the sleep in her eyes and nodded and shook her head at the correct times and her mother had hugged her so hard she had thought her ribs were going to crack.

Then she had asked Artemis if she'd heard the news. The news about the policeman who had been shot at Gotham Academy. Her heart had sunk.

"What happened? That's crazy," she said, while inside her stomach was flipping on itself over and over like a washing machine: why had she let Capooche get involved; why had she thought he could take care of himself?

Her mum told her that the Academy had released a statement saying that it was cooperating with police enquiry and that all student classes were suspended. And her voice was raspy and grey and dead when she said, "that's not good. At least we get the day off school, though."

As soon as her mother was out the door on the way to work, she had looked up the news sites. It was Capooche. He was alive, somehow. Had made it to a hospital, somehow. She had questions. But Capooche was alive, and he might be able to answer them.

She tried the nearest hospital. She didn't have to ask where he was being kept in the ICU, she just followed the trail of police officers. If she was stopped she had a plan to tell them she was lost, and looking for her mother (she'd use the name of the woman she'd seen on a previous door) but she wasn't stopped. The police officers looked like sad ants trailing up and down the hallway waiting for food, or whatever it was ants waited for.

She found the door, guarded by one alert-looking police officer, and a tired one. They looked jumpy. If someone had shot one of your friends, you'd be jumpy too, she thought. One of her friends had been shot, another voice inside her said. And she realised she meant it. Capooche was a good person. One of the few good people. The world would be sadder without him. She reminded herself not to think like that.

She ducked around the corner before they saw her, and then waited for one of them to leave. It was the tired one who stayed.

"What are you doing here?" The cop at the door asked her, when she walked up to him. He was black. He hadn't shaved. His eyes looked like they were bruised. Empty coffee cups were scattered around the bin next to him.

The hospital beeped around Artemis. She winced from the glare. The too-white fluorescent light edged its way into the corner of her eyes even when she blinked.

"How's he doing?" she asked.

"Stable," he said and she breathed a sigh of relief. "He got out of surgery an hour ago. He's lucky he was wearing the vest."

"Can I see him?" she asked.

He shook his head. "Sorry, no one can go in."

"He was investigating the case about my friend," Artemis said.

"Elizabeth Kane," the cop said.

She looked up in surprise. "How do you know?"

"He was my partner." They both winced. " _Is_. He _is_ my partner."

Artemis glanced at the shut door. She could see a small way into the room from the glass pane set into the door. The room was dark. It looked dusty.

"I have to see him," she said. He started to disagree but she spoke over him. "The next time I can come back… he might be gone. I want to say goodbye and thank you to him. Just in case. Nobody else in the force cared about Bette. She was just another girl lost in the system. But Martin cared." Artemis was surprised by how easily the words came out. She meant every single one, she realised.

The cop sighed, and leant back against the wall. "Five minutes," he said. "That's all I can give you. Heck, it's not like he's going to care either way."

"Thanks," Artemis said. The cop nodded.

"Five minutes," he repeated, and opened the door.

Artemis stepped inside. The door clicked shut behind her. The only sound was the wheeze of the respirator and the steady beep from the monitor. The room was dark, and Artemis bumped into the side of a table. A card sitting next to a vase of daffodils fell over. Artemis picked it up gently. While doing so, she couldn't resist reading the neat cursive printed in blue ink.

 _Dear Martin,_

 _I tried to visit you, but they wouldn't let me in. I'm sorry. I don't really know what to write on a card like this. Please don't die, Marty. Please don't die. I couldn't bear the thought of you and Chloe both gone. I know you don't believe in Him, but I'm praying for you. Every night I'm praying for you. I would write more, but I can't stand the thought of all your cop buddies and you laughing over this when you get better. Please get better._

 _Love & light,_

 _Sarah_

Artemis suddenly felt intrusive, and she carefully righted the card. On the front was a picture of a dog wearing a bowtie. The flowers were already wilting, she noticed. They would die soon.

She walked up next to the hospital bed. Capooche looked in worse shape than the flowers, like he was already dead. His face was nearly the same white as his sheets. His face was screwed up like he was in pain. Could you be in pain while in a coma? Artemis hoped he was having good dreams. She crouched down on her haunches next to him. She could feel a faint breeze on her skin coming from the respirator. Capooche's hand was hanging off the edge of the bed, and she lifted it up and tucked it back in. His hand was cold. It was like moving the hand of a statue. Or a corpse.

The curtains were drawn. She walked over to them and peeked out. The skyscrapers shone brightly. She could see the docks from the window, the water bright blue and trapping light.

"You've got a nice view, Capooche," she said. There was a lump in the back of her throat. Capooche had been nice to her. He had been a good cop. He wasn't dead yet. _Wasn't he_? a small voice in the back of her head. She shook it away.

She heard a sound and she jumped, muscles taught. But it had been nothing. She relaxed. Then she heard it again–a whisper in the air. She looked up in shock, had that come from? She moved over next to Capooche. His eyes were wide open, his lips were moving. His hand shook as it moved up to the respirator, clawing at it.

She lifted it off him, and a renewed flurry of loud beeps sounded. His chest heaved and he coughed. He was trying to say something.

She leaned close into him, his breath was faint and it tickled her ear. "The docks," he wheezed so softly she could just make out the words. "The docks." She glanced out the window at the docks in question.

"What about them? Capooche?" Artemis was frantic. She shook his shoulder and he grunted in pain and she winced. "Capooche! What about the docks? Capooche?"

Capooche grunted, his face screwed up like a raisin. Then his body started shaking like he was having a seizure. Then it went still. And then everything was beeping and the door flew open and nurses rushed into the room and she was being pushed out the door by a large nurse with steely eyes and an iron grip.

"Starting compressions," a nurse said too calmly. Artemis glanced behind her at Capooche laid back in the bed, a nurse bent over him pumping on his chest. The monitor was going crazy. The peaked green lines jumped and then went flat. A monotone beep echoed through the room and got stuck in the bottom of Artemis' stomach. "Defibrillator!" A nurse shouted.

The door shut in her face. She felt cold. The cop was shaking her shoulder.

"What did you do?" His face was wild and angry. "Did he say anything? Christ." He wiped his face with a palm, pulling down the skin on his face like it was melting wax. The other cop came running down the hall. He dropped the two cups he was holding, and a dark liquid spilled out across the floor and filled her throat with the smell of coffee.

Artemis shook her head–she didn't know what to say. She started off down the corridor.

"Police! Freeze!" shouted the coffee-dropper. He had pulled his gun out, it was pointing at her. She slowed down. She was not going to die being shot by a trigger-happy crappy cop.

"Put the gun down, Bill you bloody idiot!" Capooche's partner said. "She's a young girl, not a rabid man wielding a submachine gun, what the fuck are doing?"

"Right," the cop looked chagrined and put away his gun. "Sorry, miss," he said.

"Off with you," the cop said to her.

Artemis walked down through the corridor and out into Gotham and the cool light of morning. Capooche… No, the docks. Didn't the man on the phone say something similar? Moving something forward. The docks. Tonight. Capooche's fight was his alone. She had other priorities. He had given her something vital. Information. She checked the time. 5pm. Was it really that late? It took longer getting to, from, in and out of the hospital than she had thought. They didn't have long. Artemis started towards the subway, dialling a number on her phone as she ran.

"Dick? Listen. Shit's about to go down."

* * *

Martin Capooche was lost and in pain. So much pain. His legs were being stabbed with needles, but that was nothing compared to the seething pain in his chest. He tried to shout for help but he couldn't talk, his tongue filled up his whole mouth. He could dimly feel his body spread out before him, sheets cool against his burning skin. His ears were filled with this ringing. He knew the nurses were talking, he could hear their voices, he just couldn't translate what they were saying. His whole being felt sluggish and slow, like he was being filled up with a dark and soupy thick tar that was quickly hardening inside his hands, legs, stomach, neck.

The girl had just left. He couldn't remember her name. He couldn't seem to be able to remember anything. He knew she was important. She had to do something important. About a girl. Rescuing a girl. What was her name? Bette, that's right, Bette.

"The docks," he whispered. "The docks."

Then he remembered Billy. And Billy's father. Then his chest clamped up.

"Starting compressions," someone said. There were shadowed figures around his bed. Were they demons? Something else? He tried to brush one away, but his arm was grabbed from him and held down on the bed.

"He's resisting!" someone said, but he couldn't recognise anything more than sounds. There was a flash of pain red blind hot and he heard himself cry out. He was dying, he realised.

Then everything went still.

And then he couldn't feel anything.

* * *

Dick was already inside her apartment when Artemis unlocked the door.

"How did you get in here?" she asked.

Dick grinned, leaned back on the sofa, and put his feet up on the coffee table. "Trade secrets," he said.

"I…" Artemis began. But she didn't know what she wanted to say. Her mind kept flashing back to the hospital and that small sterile room that smelled like death and Martin Capooche spasming, face wincing in pain. The flatlining machine, his mouth open as if he were surprised he was all of a sudden dying. Maybe dead. "I…" Artemis felt something inside her open up and all of a sudden she was crying and damn she nearly never cried and she turned and she didn't want Dick to see her like this but there he was pulling her hands gently away from her face and wrapping his arms around her. She buried her face in his neck. And just sobbed. Like a child.

"God, that was embarrassing," she said afterwards, when they were sitting next to each other on the couch.

"Only for you," he grinned.

She punched his arm.

"Ow."

"You deserved it."

"If I start crying will you hug me better?"

"Shut up."

They both laughed. Artemis wiped her eyes. Her face always felt puffy after she cried. Like she was allergic to tears.

"He was just lying there," Artemis explained. "He looked so old. Pale. Like he was already dead." She winced at the last word. "I didn't mean…"

"I know."

"I hope he makes it."

"Me too."

"About the docks…"

"I think we should call in some backup," Dick said.

"Like the police?" Artemis asked, frowning. "Look what happened to Capooche. We can handle him. I'm not an ordinary schoolgirl." Artemis stood up from the couch, exasperated. For a moment she had thought that he understood her. How could she ever had expected that from someone not like her? Gosh she was stupid. "I can't be–"

"I know," Dick cut her off. He stood up with her, looked her in the eyes. "I know." And all of a sudden she recognised him. The curve of his eyebones, the sharp cheekbones, the mess of black hair. How had she not seen it before?

"Robin?"

Dick spread his arms wide. "Surprise," he said and flashed her a disarming smile.

* * *

Bette paced the small concrete walled room. A bare light bulb flickered above her. Great. She had traded one prison for another. She banged on the door with her fist until it ached.

"Let me out! Why rescue me to lock me up again!?" She shouted. Her throat was hoarse. She hadn't had anything to drink since the mask-wearing woman had handed her a small bottle of water a couple of hours ago, when she had pushed her into this room.

The door creaked open, and the masked woman was standing in front of her. "Christ, you're starting to make me wish that I'd left you there. Shut it, would you. I'm trying to think." The door started to shut, but Bette jammed her foot between the door and the frame. She tilted her head to look through the small opening.

"Please," she said. "Let me go."

"I will," the masked woman said.

"Oh really. When?"

"Tonight."

Bette opened her mouth but nothing came out. Tonight? That answer was unexpected. "You're a liar," she said.

The woman laughed. "Yes. I am. But I'm not lying about this. I have _some_ standards. I don't hurt innocent schoolgirls. Why do you think I went to all that trouble to rescue you anyway?"

Bette grunted. "Nice moves by the way, where'd you learn that, ninja school?"

"My father."

"Must be a cool guy."

"Not really."

Bette stared at the mask, trying to see anything. Some hint of emotion. Something that might help. The mask was featureless, chipped and scarred by god knows what.

"Why are you keeping me here if you're going to release me anyway?" Bette tried a different angle.

"I don't have to explain myself to you," the masked woman said. "You're the one who's behind that door." The woman paused for a moment. "Things are happening tonight that I want to keep you out of. I'm… trying to do the right thing. I'll bring you some food in an hour"

The door clanged closed. Bette slid down the side of the wall to the ground.

She shut her eyes and went back to waiting.

Artemis punched Dick–no, Robin–hard. How had she not seen it? It was so freaking obvious, looking back on it.

"You're angry," he said.

She went to punch him again, but he blocked it with an arm. She sweep-kicked his feet out from under him and he thudded against the floor. He flipped himself back up, palms faced toward her like he was trying to calm down an angry animal. "Can't we talk this through?" he said.

She sent a kick toward his head. He did nothing to stop it. Damn him! She pulled the kick back before it hit him. "Fight me!" she said.

"No," Dick said.

She aimed for his solar plexus with her hand, but when he did nothing to block it she pulled the punch back as well.

"Come on," she said, frustrated.

"We have more important things to worry about," Dick said. "We have three hours to get to the docks, find all of the kids, and get out."

Artemis paused at Dick's grim expression. "All of the kids?"

"They didn't release it to the media. All of the students staying at the dorms were kidnapped."

"The man in the suit," Artemis said. "How did he manage it?"

"Gas. Through the air-conditioning units. I had a poke around this morning. It really was quite clever of him…" Dick trailed off at her look. "Right, don't compliment the evil megalomaniacs. Got it."

"To the docks? We need to see what's going on there."

"What about the Team?" Dick said.

"I'm on probation, remember," Artemis said. Then she paused. "So you know."

"About what?"

"About my family."

Dick shrugged so nonchalantly that Artemis' heart swelled. "I've known for months," he said. "We aren't who our families are. You're your own person, with your own choices, motivations and skills. Never forget that. Now get that tight green suit on you, I know it must take an age."

"What about the Team?" Artemis smiled.

Dick looked at her and grinned. "Screw the Team," he said and pulled out a bag that was hiding under the couch. He tipped it upside down and his suit and gear fell out.

"You knew this was going to happen?" Artemis said, surprised.

"I'm going to quit the superhero gig and go into fortune telling," Dick said. "It's time to get whelmed. Do you know how many times I've had to stop myself from saying that? Instant giveaway."

Artemis changed in her room, and when she came out Dick was doing up his utility belt.

"Thought girls were the ones who are meant to take ages getting ready," she said.

"That's a bit sexist don't you think," Dick said.

"Just be quiet."

"Nope."

Artemis found herself grinning and then she remembered Capooche. Focus on the mission, she thought. Mission first. She curbed all sense of fun and focused. She was going to save those students. Even if it killed her.

* * *

Where was he?

Martin Capooche looked down and saw something spread out against the white hospital sheets like a snow angel, bony arms, shock of grey hair, lying there still. He was looking at himself, he realised.

He floated up more. He was floating?

He tried to look at himself, _this_ himself, not the body lying there down near the ground. And somehow, impossibly, he could see himself from a third person view. He was young, dressed in a suit, the day he married Sarah. The happiest day of his life tied with when his daughter, Chloe, was born. For some reason, he was glowing faintly.

Strange.

And then Chloe was there, she all he could see in front of him, her hand outstretched. Soft light behind her. Heavenly. Chloe radiated a sense of peace that washed over him and he relaxed. Everything he had been through was transitory. This was eternal. He willed himself closer.

Closer.

Close enough to see the small scar on Chloe's chin when she had fallen down the stairs, the mole on her right earlobe.

He was crying. Tears dripped down his cheeks and fell, glowing raindrops that disappeared into mist when they reached his hips. Capooche had never felt happier. He stretched out toward her. Just a little further. One. Last. Ti-

 **NO**.

The voice shook his bones, his blood. It resonated deep inside him, jarring him. The voice was _his_ note, the same way the right note could cause glass to shatter. He shivered. The voice jarred away the magnetic pull up into the light. What in the hell was that?

Capooche moved closer towards the light. Towards Chloe.

 **NOT YET.**

But he wanted to go there with her. Her pale pudgy hand was still there, in front of him. Her blonde hair swept around her like a halo. What was the voice?

Who are you? he thought.

 **AN ANSWER.**

It could read his mind? An answer to what? Capooche thought at it. The voice didn't reply. The light behind Chloe flashed so bright that Capooche thought he would have to look away. But he didn't even have to blink. Why didn't he have to blink.

The realisation came like gunshot. Am I dead?

 **NOT YET.**

Capooche felt relief, then remembered his body lying on the bed. Will I? Will I die?

 **YOU DON'T HAVE TO.**

What does that mean?

 **YOU MUST MAKE A CHOICE. TO STAY ON EARTH OR ASCEND.**

That's a pretty easy choice, Capooche thought. His time was up, he'd had his run. He'd lived as best he could. He was ready for something else. Something _more._

 **THERE IS MORE LEFT FOR YOU HERE. PEOPLE YOU CAN SAVE.**

Capooche shook his head. He'd had enough burdens. Enough pain. Enough everything. He just wanted peace. Why couldn't he have peace?

 **YOU HAVE WORK TO DO. I AM SORRY, CHILD.**

But I get to choose, Capooche thought.

 **YES. I CANNOT FORCE YOU TO STAY. THAT IS YOUR CHOICE. YOUR CHOICE ALONE.**

Capooche looked down again at his body. Nurses were bent over him. He realised that they must have been the shadowy figures he had seen before.

"Clear!" A nurse leant over, rubbed the defibrillators together, then pushed them down onto his bare chest. The body jumped. Capooche felt a faint pressure on his chest like a tiny heartbeat.

 **YOU DO NOT HAVE MUCH TIME. ALREADY YOUR BODY FADES WITHOUT YOUR SOUL.**

Capooche wondered if this was a dream.

 **NO MORE THAN YOUR LIFE IS A DREAM TO YOU. WHAT IS A DREAM TO ONE IS REALITY TO ANOTHER. THIS UNIVERSE IS FOLDED ONTO ITSELF.**

Capooche looked down at his body, shuddering with another defibrillator blast. He hadn't ever noticed how truly old he looked. He looked down at the glowing form he was in now. He felt peace. There was no pain in his right hip. No heart burn or indigestion. No cancer eating away at every major organ of his body.

 **I AM SORRY. YOU HAVE LIVED A HARD LIFE.**

That was an understatement.

 **BUT IT HAS BEEN FILLED WITH BEAUTY TOO.**

Capooche found himself immersed in a series of images so lifelike and real that it was like he was reliving them over again.

 _Him, standing at the altar, bladder painfully full because he had forgotten to go to the toilet beforehand. Trying not to slouch. His shoes old, laces frayed: his father's old pair, uncomfortably large. The priest next to him giving him encouraging smiles. Had he really looked that nervous? Then the door opening letting in the bright outside, blinking into the light and then Sarah emerging from it. Looking. Oh god. So beautiful he couldn't decipher it into words if he tried._

 _His mother and father, kissing at the dinner table. Telling him to wash up the dinner and then chasing each other and running upstairs, unashamed of their love._

 _His father, cupping his head in the bath after he'd been in another fight at school. Gently washing the cuts on his face. His mother giving him antiseptic cream at night. Gently dabbing it on, her lips cool against his cheek after the stinging of the cream._

 _A dandelion, poking through a crack in the pavement, unaware of its beauty in simply existing._

 _His family at the park in Autumn, leaves pinwheeling around them like sparks. Chloe on the swing, face flushed from the cool morning. Laughing as she tried to swing herself higher and higher into the sun. Sarah laughing next to him, her cold nose burrowing into his neck, her breath warm against his collarbone._

 _Him, standing next to Dave, newly graduated from the Police Academy. Face hurting from smiling too much. Sky bright blue and clear. Looking down to the front row of the audience and seeing Sarah cheering and jumping up and down in joy._

That is all what has happened, Capooche thought, and he was back above his body, looking up at his daughter, talking to the light. That is all the past.

 **BEAUTY, LIKE LOVE, TRUE LOVE, IS ETERNAL. THERE WILL BE MORE BEAUTY. YOUR WORLD IS FILLED WITH IT, CHILD.**

And pain, Capooche thought. So much pain.

 **YES.**

You're not going to try to tell me that pain is what makes life so beautiful?

 **WHAT IS THAT TERM YOU HUMANS USE? I DO NOT WANT TO BULLSHIT YOU, CHILD.**

Capooche laughed.

He looked up at Chloe, smiling at him. He wanted to see her. So much. He had never felt the longing as hard as he did now. Everything felt raw. It was as if she had just died. He willed himself closer. They were almost touching.

 **SHE WILL BE WAITING FOR YOU. YOU WILL SEE EACH OTHER AGAIN.**

But there was nothing in this world more important than seeing her now.

 **NOTHING? NOT EVEN THE CHANCE TO HELP OTHERS? TO SEE ALL THIS WOLRD HAS TO OFFER YOU?**

Capooche wanted to be selfish. Did that make him a bad person?

 **NO, NOT BAD. JUST HUMAN.**

Capooche felt a tugging on his body.

"I'm calling it," a nurse said. "Time of death…"

 **QUICKLY NOW. A CHOICE MUST BE MADE.**

But Capooche had already made his choice.

I'll see you again, he said to his daughter.

And he turned away from the blinding light toward the white hospital sheets and the old, grey body lying there.

* * *

A/N: Sorry for the wait, life has been crazy! Only one chapter left to go. My thanks to people who are still reading. If you've enjoyed the story so far, make my day by leaving a review!

Love & Light

~WCW


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